Corporate legacy media are trying to keep key social platforms “in check” by running stories about them complying – or being complicit, or compatible with – some of the currently most notorious anti-free speech legislation.
Meta’s Oversight Board is thus said to be working to adhere to the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) – but perhaps not as efficiently as it should.
Yet before any entity can execute censorship, it must be funded, since it all eventually, one way or another, comes down to money. In this case, Meta has apparently been increasingly less enthusiastic about providing that money.
But now, the Board appears to be looking at the DSA as an avenue to get the money, so that “the mission” may continue.
This sum-up of the seemingly muddled train-of-thought reporting comes from the Washington Post – but the key point behind it seems to be closer to home in the US, than anything that may or may not be happening in Europe.
Meta’s Board was first conceived in 2018 – as the corporation was still trying to fight off (what turned out to be debunked) accusations that it allowed foreign propaganda to fully steer US elections, two years prior.
Facebook (Meta) was happy to establish the Board – and in the process essentially agreed with the 2016 election integrity deniers who claimed it was something other than the majority vote cast by US citizens who decided the outcome.
Meta may have done it just to get rabid politicians and media off their back – but in the meantime, it looks like the company lost the will to keep spending money on the Board.
Now, with another election coming up, the same media are criticizing the Board as having failed their expectations in the US – but they still want it there, and the EU might provide the financial lifeline.
The Washington Post calls it nothing short of the Oversight Board possibly getting “a second chance.” To do what?
Apparently, let a “court of journalists, analysts and experts (…) investigate Meta’s handling of controversial posts” – and reinstate Facebook to its supposedly existing pre-2016 glory (restore “Meta’s blemished reputation,” as WaPo puts it).
Now, the EU comes into the picture, and the DSA is a possible new “funding factor.”
“The Oversight Board administrators touted (to the EU) the group’s experience in making impartial decisions about contentious content moderation challenges facing Meta, according to a slide-deck pitch, which was viewed by the Washington Post,” said the report.