Facebook Pledges $130 Million to Fund 'Supreme Court' for Content--Update

By Jeff Horwitz 

Facebook Inc. will pay $130 million to establish an independent board charged with reviewing the company's content moderating, providing long-term backing to its experiment in better policing the platform.

The money, which Facebook described as an "initial commitment," is meant to cover six years of operations, including salaries for board members, office space and a staff including case managers, lawyers and human resources personnel. A corporate trust managed by financial services firm Brown Brothers Harriman will in turn oversee the board's budget and administration.

The money marks a significant investment in an organization that doesn't yet exist, but could take on responsibility for some of the company's thorniest decisions. In recent years, Facebook has been beset by public controversies over how it handles misinformation, hate speech and graphic content.

Similar controversies have occurred at Alphabet Inc.'s YouTube and Twitter Inc. But Facebook is the first of the social media giants to give an outside organization potentially binding control over how some of them are addressed.

Sometimes dubbed "Facebook's Supreme Court," the board will function like an appeals court, with five-person panels adjudicating controversies arising from Facebook's in-house efforts to enforce its content standards. In addition to rendering binding decisions on a case-by-case basis, the board can recommend policy changes to Facebook that the company must publicly address.

The review board has been in the works since last year, when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that despite his optimism about the company's role in society, "without sufficient safeguards, people will misuse these tools to interfere in elections, spread misinformation, and incite violence."

Before launching the board, the company held listening sessions across the globe and produced numerous reports on its plans and feedback. Thursday's funding announcement was paired with news of an additional delay: Facebook says it no longer expects to appoint board members before early next year.

Write to Jeff Horwitz at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

December 12, 2019 11:55 ET (16:55 GMT)

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