Dr. Pierre François Docquir:

The Senator is absolutely correct. The Facebook oversight board is the only mechanism today that exercises external oversight of a social media company. At Article 19, we think it is an interesting experiment but it will take some time before we can make up our mind about its effectiveness. The oversight board is for Facebook only, whereas the social media council, SMC, would be an industry-wide mechanism. The oversight board applies Facebook's community standards and we propose that the social media council should work on the basis of international standards regarding freedom of expression. Finally, the oversight board is a global mechanism of 20 people who are supposed to take care of the entire planet, or almost that, given that that is the size of Facebook, to a degree. By contrast, the social media council in Ireland would be for Irish cases only and would be operated by people who speak the language and know the context very well. We think there is something key in ensuring that local voices can have a say in the oversight of content moderation problems that affect their society.