Facebook's 'supreme court' to launch too late for US election

Facebook is under fire after being forced to admit a supposedly independent oversight board of grandees is unlikely to be ready in time to rule on cases linked to the US election.

Dubbed the platform's "supreme court", the body - whose members include former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger - will start reviewing cases later in October, but its decisions are not likely to take effect for another three months.

This means the board is unlikely to consider moderation issues linked to the forthcoming US election on November 3, despite an outcry four years ago over claims that Facebook was used by Russian hackers seeking to interfere in American democracy.

The board is meant to rule on controversial issues regarding freedom of expression on Facebook and Instagram, and has the power to reverse the company's decisions on what content should be removed.

However, it has been repeatedly accused of simply giving cover to all-powerful boss Mark Zuckerberg, and the board has been criticised as a fig leaf. Facebook has refused to say how much it pays members.

It came as the US Senates commerce committee voted to subpoena Mr Zuckerberg alongside Twitter boss Jack Dorsey and Google chief executive Sunder Pichai, meaning they will be ordered to give evidence in public at a future data.

Dex Hunter-Torricke, head of communications at Oversight Board Administration, said a Facebook review process of the board's decisions could be sped up to take as little as several days, but the body was not created to respond to issues in real time.

He said: "We are building a process and institution that can make decisions in a careful, principled way."

Facebook did not respond to a request for further comment.

In response to allegations the platform enables election manipulation, Facebook has experimented with paying users to deactivate their accounts and it has cracked down on controversial election content.

Facebook took down adverts posted by Donald Trump's re-election campaign in June, because they featured a red triangle, better-known as a symbol used to mark political prisoners in Nazi camps.

The company also took down a video posted by the President two months later, about how children were immune to the coronavirus because, they said, it violated their rules on misinformation.

Yet for many, these decisions did not go far enough.

This week a group of activists and MPs set up the ‘Real Facebook Oversight Board’ to campaign for "accountability in real-time".

Tory MP Damian Collins, who is one of the spoof board's members, said: "The Real Facebook Oversight Board was convened urgently to put pressure on Facebook to take action in the upcoming US Presidential election."

He claimed that it has already helped persuade the company to change its advertising rules.

Mark Zuckerberg, who famously said that Facebook's motto was to 'move fast and break things', first proposed the creation of the new Oversight Board in 2018.