But while these are the kind of issues Facebook’s tens of thousands of moderators face on a daily basis, these five could mark the start of a new era of governance for the entire internet. They are, in effect, the first rulings of the site’s contentious new Oversight Board.

Facebook has for years been searching for a simple solution to the problems thrown up by its enormous growth; it alone has two billion users, while Instagram (which it also owns) has nearly as many. But who should be in charge of uniformly monitoring their posts?

Critics have long warned that no company — let alone one largely controlled by Mark Zuckerberg — should have that much power. At the same time, Facebook has been reluctant to let individual governments introduce onerous laws governing its operation — for the simple reason that it could leave the website with 190 or more separate legally binding rulebooks to enforce. It has claimed to be open to countries cooperating to come up with such a set of rules, but, unsurprisingly, that has not happened.

More from this author

Why 'Defund the police' works as a slogan

By James Ball

So into that gulf Facebook has created an Oversight Board, which it has endowed with $130 million for its first years of operation. Predictably the board, which is supposedly independent and has the power to reverse the company’s decisions, has faced fervent criticism from the outset. Long before it first made any of its rulings, critics set up an opposing “Real Facebook Oversight Board”, triggering a legal war of words with the social media giant over whether or not they could use that name.

The early consensus seemed clear: the Oversight Board would not be sufficiently independent, would be comprised of patsies and should be written off early. Yet the real picture seems far more complex: after all, if Facebook had wanted to set up an organisation to act as a fig leaf for accountability, it could have done so far more easily and without such an excessive price tag.

For a start, Facebook is unable to pull the funding for the Oversight Board for at least six years — meaning that it is committed to spending more than $20 million a year for that period. At that point, the Board should in theory be well established, so that if it has proven itself effective and Zuckerberg pulls the plug, that will be visible to the world’s media. Not a good look.

As for Facebook’s claims about the Board’s independence, there do seem to be legitimate concerns to be had about the company’s ability to refer cases to the Board and require it to rule on them. But for the most part, the Board members are able to select their own cases from the thousands sent their way by user appeals. It is also able to draw upon whatever human rights and expression principles it chooses to shape its decision making.

Suggested reading

When will the online Thought Police come for you?

By Andrew Doyle

But funding and terms of reference can only get you so far. The real question is who is chosen to make up the membership of the Oversight Board. And here comes a catch — the first batch are chosen by Facebook, as they inevitably would be directly or indirectly (if someone else is going to pick the Board members, Facebook has to pick them). But future Board members will be chosen by current ones.

So has the company loaded up the Oversight Board with loyalists? The honest answer is that it doesn’t seem so. Quite a few people among the first 20 are public critics of the site, and most of the others don’t seem like its natural allies. Law professor Jamal Greene has publicly stated “there’s lots of reasons” not to trust Facebook, while professor Evelyn Aswad has published multiple papers calling on social giants to align themselves with international human rights law.

Only five of the first 20 Board members are from the USA, while ten are women. They reach across the political spectrum, though most come from a background in human rights, freedom of expression or international law. But the Board also includes former Prime Minister of Denmark Helle Thorning-Schmidt, and Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian when it published Edward Snowden’s revelations on NSA surveillance and Big Tech’s complicity therein. (Disclosure: I worked for The Guardian on that project.)

More importantly, the Board’s first five rulings have hardly gone in Facebook’s favour: indeed, it ruled against the social media giant in four of them. One such ruling reinstated a French post advocating for the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19. The Board didn’t find the post to be accurate — it agreed it was likely misinformation — but found it didn’t meet the site’s criteria for posing a risk of “imminent harm”. Instead it concluded the rules themselves were “inappropriately vague and inconsistent with international human rights standards”.

Suggested reading

How Big Tech seduced the Left

By Geoff Shullenberger

Certainly it’s encouraging to see the Oversight Board making a robust attempt to hold Facebook to account and force it to improve its rulebook. In time, this will no doubt create a set of rules tested and tempered by human rights experts around the world. Indeed, it’s not difficult to imagine how this could easily become the model rulebook — a constitution of sorts — for the site, and from there for the entire internet. If other tech companies see this system work out for one platform and, more importantly, reduce the criticism it receives, they will likely adopt it themselves.

And that would probably represent a real improvement to today’s reality. But make no mistake: the biggest winner here would still be Facebook. It would get, through a process that it controlled, the chance to create a rulebook based on the smallest amount of action; what would be the slimmest and cheapest way to enforce a collection of rules that would get lawmakers and activists off its back?

As a process, it’s like allowing a defendant to not only choose their judge and jury, but to also help write the criminal code before their case begins. However much you try to maintain an appearance of fairness, everyone is still going to suspect you’ve stacked the deck to help yourself.

To switch metaphors, think about which of two dictators is the cannier operator. Is it the one who pumps out blatant propaganda on television, jails serious political opponents and wins every election with 95% of the vote? Or is it the one who allows just enough dissent, lets rival political parties exist, but makes sure that come what may he’ll always get enough votes to stay in power?

At the end of the day, it’s worth remembering that Facebook makes tens of billions in profits each year — so $130 million over six years would be an extremely low-cost way of perpetuating something close to the status quo. For if this effort is successful, the benefits will be immeasurable.  It would allow the company to restrict scrutiny over which content should be permissible to case-by-case examples. It would stifle discussion of how its algorithms work, and what effects they have. And more importantly, if the Oversight Board is used by Facebook to resist efforts by nation states to create their own legislation, it would be essentially elevating itself to a position higher than democratically elected governments.

Activists are understandably worried about the prospect of a toothless Facebook Oversight Board stacked with patsies. Perhaps they should be more worried about the effects of one that actually does its job.

In a strange way Jones is a natural mutation of the internet business model itself – more outrage equals more clicks equals more sales. Perhaps one reason Google and Facebook ditched him was because he reminded them too much of themselves.

The Jones banishment is part of a concerted effort. The big tech firms are under increasing pressure to make the place more hostile for people like him: over the past few weeks and months several high profile radical right-wingers have found social media – for a long time their haven – is no longer so welcoming. Gavin McInnes, Vice Founder and alt-liter, was also expelled. Milo Yiannopoulus was acrimoniously dumped some time ago. Behind the scenes the companies are upping their monitoring procedures and removing significantly more content than even just a year ago – especially radical Islamist.

Very few liberals were overly worried about the Jones affair. To anyone who expressed a concern about free speech, the stock response was: Facebook and co haven’t denied Jones his freedom of speech. They haven’t stopped him from hosting his own blog, from shouting from his own rooftop or writing his own newsletter. They have simply stopped him spewing his babbling drivel on their private platform. Private platforms can do as they wish.

This is exactly correct, and I’m glad they’re acting more responsibly. But it is also exactly the problem. Regardless of the specifics of the Jones case, it illustrates the way tech companies increasingly decide what ideas people access, what’s in the public domain and what’s not, and therefore the shape and contour of the public sphere.

Not in a strictly legal sense: Alex Jones could indeed start up his own newsletter, and he probably will. But in a functional sense the public sphere has become a private enterprise, a set of servers owned by Californian companies.

I don’t need to recite the stats about how much time people spend there, or how majorities get their news from social media. You all know that Facebook (including Instagram), Twitter, Google (including YouTube), and Apple (iTunes) is where people receive their information about the world, and where the issues of the day are thrashed out. Amazon will join them soon enough, because personal assistant devices will become de facto info curators (‘Alexa – tell me the news’). You may be vaguely aware that these are all private profit-making companies, tucked along the West Coast with shareholders and profit targets and advertiser pressure.

Suggested reading

Review: "The People vs Tech", the threat at the heart of the internet

By James Ball

I don’t envy these companies by the way. They would rather not make determinations like this. They don’t want to get tangled up in controversial debates about what should or shouldn’t be hosted, but their size and influence has made it unavoidable. Whatever choice they make – whether about politics, offensive images, nipples – someone will get upset when their stuff is up or down on the great algorithmic wheel of fortune.

In any case, this transformation – public space into private server – is far bigger even than Mr Jones’ over-inflated digital footprint. There are plenty of ways the public debate can be subtly controlled, accidentally or through design. Algorithms are designed to serve you content that you’re likely to click on, as that means the potential to sell more advertising alongside it. For example, YouTube’s ‘up next’ videos are selected based on a sophisticated analysis of what is most likely to keep a person hooked in.

There are lots of reasons why politics has turned into a hot angry mess, but public discussion being subverted to the needs of advertisers ranks high among them. And before you say ‘But Rupert Murdoch…’, newspapers and broadcasters are still subject to more stringent regulation than social media. Not to mention that the YouTube algorithm alone shapes what over a billion users are likely to see, which is more than every newspaper in the world combined.

It gets worse. According to Robert Epstein, a psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioural Research and Technology, based on the win margins in national elections around the world, Google could determine the outcome of “upwards of 25 per cent” of them based on how it displayed search results.  There is no evidence that Facebook or Google have or would intentionally do such a thing – but how would you ever know?

Perhaps the Alex Jones decision was the right one. Having watched a lot of his stuff, no doubt it breaches all sorts of terms and conditions. But in the end these companies were surely also motivated by pressure, by fears about advertisers jumping ship, by PR, by popularity. (Twitter, to its credit, seemed more open, and said it would stick to banning accounts based on its rules).

Suggested reading

The cracks appearing in the digital economy's foundations

By David Z Morris

Ultimately, the transformation of the public sphere into a private server means that what we see will be increasingly motivated by advertiser needs, by reputation – cue the heckler’s veto, where whoever shouts the most gets their way – or by profit.  That’s not a good basis for such decisions. And whatever the motivating reason for removing content, those decisions will be taken by a very small group of people with similar world views, which isn’t good for political plurality.

So cheer away! It’s hard to be saddened if fantasists have a smaller public platform. But bear in mind that one day opinion might turn against your ideas and pet concerns. Or perhaps the bosses who run the giant platforms might change. You could suddenly vanish too. You’ll still have your free speech! But as you scream from the wilderness of deep cyber-space, no-one will hear you.