Today, a group of academics, researchers and civil rights leaders continue to live with ‘Facebook’s real watchdog‘which is designed to critique and discuss the platform’s role in the upcoming US elections. The group includes the former Facebook election security chief, #StopHateForProfit campaign leaders, and Roger McNamee, one of Facebook’s early investors. Facebook launched its own “Supervisory Board” last November to deal with the thorny issues of content moderation, but Facebook admitted that it would not oversee any Facebook content or activity during the U.S. election and that it would not oversee any Facebook content or activity during the U.S. election. would speak out on issues only after an event.

The press conference for the launch is broadcast live today, below:

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said last November that the Supervisory Board was “an incredibly important business” and that it “would prevent the concentration of too many decisions within our teams” and would promote “responsibility and accountability. surveillance ”.

This decision was seen as an acknowledgment of the difficulty of making decisions within Facebook. Decisions on which controversial posts to cut fall on the shoulders of individual leaders, hence the reason why the Supervisory Board will act as a “Supreme Court” for the moderation of content.

However, the Supervisory Board has admitted that it will take up to three months to make a decision and will only pass judgment on what content has been removed from the platform, not what remains.

Facebook invested $ 130 million in the council and announced its first members in May, including former Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt and former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger.

The activist-led “Real Facebook Oversight Board” includes ex-President of Estonia, Toomas Henrik Ilves, a vocal Facebook critic, and Maria Ressa, the journalist currently facing jail in the Philippines for cyber defamation.

Board members also include Shoshana Zuboff, author of Surveillance Capitalism, Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, Yael Eisenstat, former head of electoral integrity at Facebook, Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, and Jonathan Greenblatt. , CEO of the Anti-Defamation League.

The question of how Facebook moderates its content and allows its users to be targeted by campaigns has become increasingly pressing in the run-up to the US election. It’s already been revealed by Channel 4 News in the UK that 3.5 million black Americans have been profiled and categorized on Facebook and other social media as being dissuaded from voting by the Trump campaign.