Stanford Law and Policy Lab Report Provides Recommendations for Facebook’s New Oversight Board

July 29, 2019 – The Stanford Law and Policy Lab today released recommendations for Facebook’s new oversight board for content decisions. The report resulted from “Creating a Social Media Oversight Board,” a cross-disciplinary policy practicum advised by Stanford Law School (SLS) professors Paul Brest, Dan Ho, Nate Persily, and Stanford Political Science professor, Rob Reich, in partnership with the lab’s policy client, the Stanford Project on Democracy and the Internet.

Nate Persily, James B. McClatchy Professor of Law
Nate Persily, James B. McClatchy Professor of Law

“Facebook’s new oversight board represents an unprecedented attempt among social media companies to create independent oversight for their content decisions,” said Persily. “Our goal with this practicum was to provide students with an opportunity to grapple with the very difficult design decisions confronting Facebook and similar companies as they experiment with different institutions that can provide outside accountability and oversight on a global scale.”

Transparency and Accountability

In fall 2018, Mark Zuckerberg called for public comment and input on the concept and structure of an oversight board for Facebook, a process that reflects more than 30 simulations across the globe to gather feedback and expert opinion. Discussed in an interview on June 27, 2019, with Zuckerberg, Jenny Martinez, the Richard E. Lang Professor of Law and dean of Stanford Law School, and Noah Feldman, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, Facebook’s proposed independent oversight board will review Facebook content removal appeals, establishing the first such board among social media companies.

Integrative Solutions for a Complex Problem

Elizabeth Starr, JD'20
Elizabeth Starr, JD’20

In the SLS policy practicum, Stanford law and engineering students engaged in independent research to inform the design of an oversight board, within the broad outlines of the Facebook draft charter. Student researchers conducted qualitative interviews with Facebook personnel, representatives from NGOs, academics, and legal experts to assess tradeoffs and prioritize options across different adjudicatory and regulatory models. They assessed different design features for an oversight board to recommend governing principles, the structure and membership, the case selection process, procedures to review cases and issue decisions, and the board’s authority to implement its decisions.

“The project allowed us to integrate lessons across constitutional, administrative, and technology law courses,” said Liza Starr, JD ’20. “Between our faculty with expertise in those areas and our team of students with backgrounds in tech, journalism, engineering, human rights, and national security, we were able to harness so many different viewpoints to tackle this complex problem.”

Dan Ho, William Benjamin Scott and Luna M. Scott Professor of Law
Dan Ho, William Benjamin Scott and Luna M. Scott Professor of Law

Among other specific recommendations, the report recommends that the Facebook oversight board be global in its orientation, diverse in its representation, and sufficiently well-staffed to select and consider a diverse array of cases. The report also outlined an appeal case selection process and a need to establish governing principles beyond Facebook’s internal Community Standards.

“The report shows how the students seriously grappled with thorny questions of institutional design for how a board could handle and select from upwards of a million complicated content appeals a month,” said Ho.

Read the full report
Listen to the discussion of the practicum on Stanford Legal

About the Law and Policy Lab

The Law and Policy Lab at Stanford Law School is composed of students committed to improving public policy in a variety of fields. The Law and Policy Lab offers more than 20 practicums a year, in which law and other graduate students from Stanford get to work on a real public policy issue for a real client under the supervision of a faculty member. The practicums give students opportunities to develop knowledge about particular areas of public policy and the skills of policy analysis, including the ability to communicate policy findings.

About Stanford Law School

Stanford Law School is one of the nation’s leading institutions for legal scholarship and education. Its alumni are among the most influential decision makers in law, politics, business, and high technology. Faculty members argue before the Supreme Court, testify before Congress, produce outstanding legal scholarship and empirical analysis, and contribute regularly to the nation’s press as legal and policy experts. Stanford Law School has established a model for legal education that provides rigorous interdisciplinary training, hands-on experience, global perspective, and focus on public service, spearheading a movement for change.