(̶I̶n̶)̶dependent body
Facebook has taken another step towards setting up an "independent" body able to decide what content comes down or stays up on the social network. If it does not respect the decisions... nothing happens.
Facebook’s “Supreme Court” already has “judges” and will start deciding cases “in the coming months”. Two years after Mark Zuckerberg’s promise, in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the company has finally announced the names of the first 20 members it has chosen for this “independent” body — among them Helle Thorning-Schmidt, a former Danish prime minister.
With more than 1.73 billion daily users, Facebook is increasingly a real, almost absurd experiment in what can happen when a company concentrates as much power as the world’s leading powers, or more. Made worse by an almost total lack of accountability, unlike democratic governments, which are subject to scrutiny and a minimum of transparency.
AI translation from the Portuguese. First published in ECO on 7 May 2020.