Julie Owono is the executive director of Internet Sans Frontières (Internet Without Borders) and a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. She is also an inaugural member of the Meta Oversight Board, an independent group of experts who review appeals of content moderation decisions on Facebook and Instagram, which is the topic of today’s episode. 

Elizabeth and Julie talk about the background of the board and the appeals process, how cases are chosen, the possibilities and limits of what can be accomplished with content moderation, and the lesson Julie has learned in her time serving on the board. They also discuss what counts as content moderation and who gets to be involved in that process, the paradox of tolerance and where the line is drawn when it comes to limiting people’s freedoms of expression.

Additional resources:

• Off the top Elizabeth references two previous episodes that set the scene for this episode: Content Moderation with Andrew Straight and Regulating Big Tech with Taylor Owen.
• You can find the Meta Oversight Board website here, including a description of the appeals process, the decisions made to date, and board member bios.
• This 2022 article by David Wong and Luciano Floridi takes an academic look at the OB, assessing its strengths and weaknesses, and suggesting improvements.
• Julie explains some of the principles around how the board chooses which cases to review, and the Case Selection Committee that makes those decisions, which are documented in the Rulebook for Case Review and Policy Guidance.
• Julie mentions two specific cases: the Kurdistan Workers Party and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
• Elizabeth introduces Karl Popper’s Paradox of Intolerance, introduced in his 1945 book The Open Society and its Enemies. We relied on this 2015 paper by Brett G. Johnson, which applies tolerance theory to extreme speech and social media platforms.
• Julie mentions the implementation committee, and the tracking being done to capture how the OB’s recommendations are being operationalized. You can find out more in the Oversight Board’s Annual Report, Meta's Quarterly Reports and on the Meta's Transparency Centre page.

Check out www.polcommtech.ca for annotated transcripts of this episode in English and French.