This post originally appeared on the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy’s Internet Governance Project blog titled: Facebook’s Oversight Board: A toothless Supreme Court? A week and a half ago Facebook released its final charter for the Oversight Board it intends to create to tackle its content moderation problems. The charter spells out exactly how it would work,…
Tag: multistakeholderism
Link: SFChronicle Op-Ed on Facebook’s “Supreme Court”
I wrote an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle about the recently-released final charter for Facebook’s External Oversight Board, or as it is called by some, its “Supreme Court”, and how it’s just an empty gamble in the crucial online content moderation space.
Perspectives on Internet Governance: The case for the Human Element
Multistakeholder Internet governance institutions are not being properly studied. Research focuses primarily on structure, which has its own set of concerns and limitations, but it overlooks the human element, which may play a vital role in shaping these institutions. The human element, which encompasses the human actors and their networks, is potentially important because of both the way the institutions themselves function internally to promote and highlight individuals, and the effect these institutions have on the participants. While this may sound interesting, a straightforward question emerges as to why this has not yet been studied. Two explanations of why this has not been the case so far cover both the substantive environment and its inherent complexities, and the theoretical biases inherent in the most prevalent lens used to study these institutions, borrowed from a related but entirely different area of research, democratic decision-making. Based on these points, before value is added to this role, it is paramount to try and uncover whether the human element has any substantial impact in the shaping and ongoing functioning of multistakeholder institutions on par with structure, and my upcoming dissertation tackles this issue.