By: Sifted
May 24, 2021
Facebook’s oversight board is a “model of future regulation” that could expand its remit to include other large social media businesses around the world, according to one of its leading members.
Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the former prime minister of Denmark, said that the board — which has just hit the headlines for upholding the platform’s ban on Donald Trump — had the money, membership and independence to act as a cross-industry body.
Although she would have preferred the United Nations to take the lead on global content moderation, she suggested the Facebook oversight board was a good “second best solution”.
“I don’t see the UN coming up with a solution that could work as quickly as the Facebook oversight board and that would have the right funding, the right members and that could take independent decisions that could be respected by the social media companies,” she said in an interview with Sifted. “We are set up for other companies to join in the future.”
She added that the board might even one day be folded into a multilateral organisation like the UN so it was fully independent from Facebook. “Maybe, who knows, this could be taken over by multilateral organisations in the future.”