Finally, Facebook Put <em>Someone</em> in Charge

You won’t like Facebook’s new Oversight Board. Yesterday, the social-media giant unveiled its “charter” for a 40-person board with the power to review the company’s decisions about which content can appear on Facebook-owned platforms and which rules it applies when taking postings down. Deciding which videos are too violent, which photos too racy, and which behavior too “inauthentic” is a job destined to make the board unpopular. That it can be unpopular—with users, the media, and Facebook employees alike—and still exist is precisely the point.

Facebook is setting up its Oversight Board because, as the founder Mark Zuckerberg , private companies should not “be making so many important decisions about speech on our own.” He has to tell him exactly what he needs to remove from his sites. Now he’s outsourced the final say on a range of decisions to the new board. Still unclear is who will be appointed to the body, how many disputes it will take up, how it will triage them out of millions of possible cases, and how precisely it will interpret the that Facebook released last week. But for now, these details matter less than the fact that is finally in charge of making difficult decisions about online speech in public view and on a principled basis.