Facebook’s Oversight Board as a New Phase of Platform Self-Regulation

The next speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference is Rumeng Cao, whose focus is on Facebook’s Oversight Board, an independent body introduced in response to increasingly critical scrutiny of the platform’s moderation and governance decisions following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Such governance can be divided into three phases: thin self-regulation (until 2012), strengthened self-regulation (2012-18), and the Oversight Board era (from 2018).

This can also be analysed from the perspective of the relationship between discourse and institutions: institutions are manifested through their discursive practices, but they also exist in a field of power relationships between their various stakeholders. This is true for physical institutions, but also translates to the digital realm.

The Facebook Oversight Board thus represents a form of quasi-self-regulation, emerging in a lacuna for platform policy to fill a gap in communication policy-making. It also results from a problem of Facebook’s own making, since the platform’s success has created so large a userbase that effective moderation is now very complicated, and expert oversight and correction is increasingly critical.

The question here is always who decides, and who decides who decides. This affects how rules are set, and by whom; the Oversight Board lends legitimacy to such decisions by involving third parties, including civil society actors and organisations, in a collaborative rule-setting process.

If such collaboration with external stakeholders ends, this might provide new case studies on self-regulation.