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Zuck's vision to fix Facebook: an independent "Supreme Court"

Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg at the Facebook's F8 Developer Conference. Photo: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

In conversation with Vox's Ezra Klein, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out his plan for ensuring he and his platform are held accountable for the content that appears on site:

"[O]ver the long-term, what I’d really like to get to is an independent appeal. So maybe folks at Facebook make the first decision based on the community standards that are outlined, and then people can get a second opinion. You can imagine some sort of structure, almost like a Supreme Court, that is made up of independent folks who don’t work for Facebook, who ultimately make the final judgment call on what should be acceptable speech in a community that reflects the social norms and values of people all around the world."

Klein asked: "There’s no quadrennial election for CEO of Facebook. And that’s a normal way that democratic governments ensure accountability. Do you think that governance structure makes you, in some cases, less accountable?"

  • Zuck's response: "My goal here is to create a governance structure around the content and the community that reflects more what people in the community want than what short-term-oriented shareholders might want."
  • "And if we do that well, then I think that that could really break ground on governance for an internet community. But if we don’t do it well, then I think we’ll fail to handle a lot of the issues that are coming up."
  • "Right now, I don’t think we are transparent enough around the prevalence of different issues on the platform. We haven’t done a good job of publishing and being transparent about the prevalence of those kind of issues, and the work that we’re doing and the trends of how we’re driving those things down over time. "

Go deeper: The steps that Facebook is taking right now to deal with its data privacy scandal.

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