One family’s story of pandemic learning: Jordyn Coleman, an 11-year-old in Mississippi, said he used to like school but his grades and attendance have suffered because of inadequate technology for virtual classes and pandemic disruptions in his family. My colleague Daniel Victor wrote that Peloton said it made a mistake by initially fighting the agency’s request to recall the $4,295 treadmills. safety commission had warned about dozens of injuries and one child’s death that were linked to the machines. Peloton is recalling its home treadmills: A U.S. The Oversight Board is good, but the scale of Facebook and its consequences are so vast that the body can only do so much. It is a castle ruled by an all-powerful king who has invited billions of people inside to mingle - but only if they abide by opaque, ever changing rules that are often applied by a fleet of mostly lower-wage workers making rapid-fire judgment calls. Facebook is not a representative democracy with branches of government that keep a check on one another. I’m also bothered by the Supreme Court comparison for this oversight body that Facebook invented and pays for. The oversight board is a useful backstop to some of Facebook's hard calls, but it is a complete mismatch to the fast pace of communications among billions of people that, by design, happen with little human intervention. It includes journalists in the Philippines whose work is undermined by government officials regularly trashing them anonymously on the site. This includes those who have had their Facebook accounts disabled and are desperate for help to get them back, people who wind up in Facebook “jail” and don’t know which of the company’s zillions of opaque rules they might have broken and others who are harassed after someone posted something malicious about them. This is a useful measure of accountability. The board repeatedly, including on Wednesday, has urged Facebook to be far more transparent. It is remarkable that in its first year of operation, this board seems to grasp some of Facebook’s fundamental flaws: The company’s policies are opaque, and its judgments are too often flawed or incomprehensible. The Oversight Board showed that it understands the ways that Facebook is giving repeat superspreaders of bogus information a dangerous pathway to shape our beliefs. With world leaders, the Oversight Board said that Facebook should suspend accounts if they repeatedly “posted messages that pose a risk of harm under international human rights norms.” “What is important is the degree of influence that a user has over other users.” “Context matters when assessing issues of causality and the probability and imminence of harm,” the board wrote. The Oversight Board agreed that the same rules should continue to apply to everyone on Facebook - but with some big caveats. Facebook and Twitter have said that the public should generally be able to see and hear for themselves what their leaders say, even if they’re spreading misinformation.) (Actually, at least when he was president, Trump had even more leeway in his posts than your neighbor. The meat of the board’s statement is a brutal assessment of Facebook’s errors in considering the substance of people’s messages, and not the context. The quietly scathing part on influential Facebook users: “In applying a vague, standardless penalty and then referring this case to the board to resolve, Facebook seeks to avoid its responsibilities,” the board wrote. The board said Facebook should re-examine the penalty against Trump and within six months choose a time-limited ban or a permanent one rather than let the squishy suspension remain.Ī big “wow” line from the Oversight Board was its criticism of Facebook for passing the buck on what to do about Trump. When people break Facebook’s rules, the company has policies to delete the violating material, suspend the account holder for a defined period of time or permanently disable an account. His posts broke Facebook’s guidelines and presented a clear and present danger of potential violence, the board said.īut the board also said that Facebook was wrong to make Trump’s suspension indefinite. Facebook’s Oversight Board, a quasi-independent body that the company created to review some of its high-profile decisions, essentially agreed on Wednesday that Facebook was right to suspend Trump.
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