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A little-known fact about New York’s Central Park is that it was created in part by evicting 1,600 or so people who lived there, including the residents of Seneca Village, Manhattan’s first significant settlement of black property owners and the epicenter of black political power in Manhattan during the mid-19th century. The village occupied land along what is now Central Park’s western edge, between roughly 83rd and 89th Streets. From its modest beginnings in 1825, the village had grown over three decades to include homes, gardens, a school, cemeteries and perhaps as many as 300 residents. By the time it was razed more than 30 years later, the settlement counted several distinguished citizens among its property owners, including a boarding-house for sailors that served as a crucial stop on the Underground Railway.

Source: Opinion | The Death of the Black Utopia – The New York Times

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

As more media companies move towards subscription and membership-based models to try to generate additional revenue, engaging with the people formerly known as the audience has become much more important. And yet, some media companies and journalists still seem uncomfortable with this concept. How important is community building and engagement, and how should journalists and media outlets approach this task? What are the best practices? How do community or engagement-focused staffers make the case that it matters and resources should be devoted to it? These are some of the questions we asked a group of experts and practitioners during a week-long series of interviews on our Galley discussion platform. We spoke with people like Techdirt founder Mike Masnick, Ariel Zirulnick of the Membership Puzzle Project, Christine Schmidt of the Nieman Lab, Summer Fields of Hearken, Hanna Ingber of the New York Times‘ Reader Center, and Joy Mayer of Trusting News. All of those conversations and more are available here: https://galley.cjr.org/featured

Masnick, who said he started Techdirt with a focus on community from the beginning when it was a one-man blog, said that he feels the fundamental mistake many in the news business make is “not realizing it’s always been a community building business.” Historically, much of that community was based on a geographic area, or possibly specific topics or interests, Masnick says, but “many structured their businesses in a way that let them pretend the news” was the business, rather than a means to building a community.” Summer Fields said one thing Hearken does is to demonstrate the
connection between engagement and revenue. “We’ve seen that the more your audience sees you are valuing them, the more likely they are to trust you as well as support you, either financially, or with their time,” she says. Simon Galperin of GroundSource — which offers media companies a text-messaging platform for connecting with their readers or audience — said that research shows engaged audiences are three times as likely to become donors.

Joy Mayer of Trusting News said at a time when trust in journalism is extremely low, and many readers are suspicious about bias, engaging with them is often the best way to convince them you deserve their trust. “We work with newsrooms on ways to draw attention to their own mission, motivations, processes and ethics. If you work to be fair, what does that look like?” Mayer says. “It’s natural for the public to be confused, overwhelmed and frustrated by what they see journalists do. But if journalists believe in their own work, they need to take the time to explain why.” Najva Sol of Quartz says
the biggest change the company has seen in engagement came from revamping the site’s comment section. “We knew that creating a civil community experience requires a culture change,” she says. So the site did a number of things, including shifting its terminology from commenting to “contributing,” writing community behavior agreements and reaching out to experts in the Quartz reader community.

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

Facebook’s still-controversial decision to exempt political advertising on the platform from the fact-checking process has focused a lot of attention not just on the state of disinformation in general (News flash: It’s bad) but on the practice of fact-checking itself. There are more people and places than ever debunking and checking the facts on every tweet or statement from Donald Trump, and yet the volume of inaccuracies and outright falsehoods never seems to diminish. How did we get here? And what are the best practices when fact-checking in a chaotic, real-time news environment like the one we’re living in now? Can we say with any certainty that fact-checking is working at all, in the sense of correcting people’s impressions of misinformation? To explore these and other related questions, CJR convened a virtual symposium of experts and practitioners on our Galley discussion platform, including NewsGuard co-founder Gordon Crovitz, Snopes founder David Mikkelson, Jonathan Albright of Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Baybars Orsek of the International Fact-Checking Network, and Renee DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory.

Albright, who runs the Digital Forensic Research unit at the Tow Center, says that his research shows many of the basic disinformation strategies from the 2016 election — aimed at reinforcing polarization and institutional distrust — are being leveraged this time around, built on the same wedge issues as before: religion, immigration, science. But the tactics being used are evolving quickly, he says. When it comes to political advertising, Albright said fact-checking isn’t enough. “We need a [Federal Election Commission]-style portal on how citizen data is used in political campaigns, not separate platform political ad APIs.” Orsek says that Facebook’s decision not to fact-check political ads is a mistake. “I think fact-checkers should be able to flag not only political advertisements but also political claims and statements on Facebook, not necessarily with demotion enforcement, but in a way to promote fact-checkers work on areas where there is public interest for users to know more about,” he says.

Rampant disinformation may seem like a modern invention, but Kelly Weill of The Daily Beast pointed out that “the US is a country that’s always held conspiratorial thinking close to its heart. The signers of the Declaration of Independence believed a number of falsehoods about plots by King George III against America.” Conspiratorial thinking often comes with new communication methods as well, Weill notes: the modern Flat Earth movement got its start when newspapers became widely available in the UK in the mid 1840s. Brooke Binkowski, a former managing editor at Snopes.com who now works for a fact-checking site called Truth or Fiction, said fact-checkers need to adopt a more aggressive stance for these times. “You have to be prepared to stand up for the truth and defend it, in this Disinformation Age,” she says. “This isn’t ‘view from nowhere’ journalism — you have to be willing and prepared to get into peoples’ faces a bit, to tell them they’re wrong, to point your finger at them in the public square and say, Look. This is a lie, and here is the liar who is spreading it.”

Note: This is something I originally published at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

When journalists want to talk among themselves about something difficult, the anonymous Google Doc seems to have become a go-to mechanism for doing so. First there was the “Shitty Media Men” document, which was circulated in 2017, and eventually grew into a long list of alleged sexual harassers, working at some of the leading media outlets in the country. Now, there is a document circulating in which journalists are being encouraged to share the details of their salaries (Note: CJR hasn’t verified any of the salary information in the document).

The salary list doesn’t generate quite the same kind of ethical quandaries as the SMM list did, of course. Although the latter got a lot of favorable attention for shedding light on a chronic problem, some questioned the morality of identifying men as sexual harassers based solely on anonymous reports (a Poynter report called it “Wikipedia wrapped in razor blades). That said, however, it did have a positive impact, despite the fact that it was only online for about 12 hours (creator Moira Donegan took it down after reports that BuzzFeed was writing about it). The list reportedly helped contribute to the departures of a number of those who were named, including Leon Wieseltier of The Atlantic and Paris Review editor Lorin Stein.

You might think talking about salaries would be a lot less contentious than naming sexual abusers, but what people get paid has always been a touchy subject in the media business, in part because it dredges up all sorts of awkward and uncomfortable issues like lower pay for women and people of color (something a recent Washington Post salary survey confirmed is still a problem). On top of that, everyone is either ashamed to admit how small their salary is, or embarrassed to admit how large it is. Which presumably explains why the list is anonymous.

The trend towards anonymous Google Docs as a source of insider information is fascinating for a number of reasons (journalists doing anonymous journalism about journalism), and examples like the SMM list definitely bring up ethical implications that should be considered. But in the long run, we would probably all be better off — and certainly women and people of color might be — if the salary list sparked a healthy conversation about who is paying whom how much, and for what. So feel free to add yourself — don’t be shy! — and circulate it widely.

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

Most of the attention on Facebook and disinformation in the past week or so has focused on the platform’s controversial decision not to fact-check political advertising, along with the choice of right-wing site Breitbart News as one of the “trusted sources” for Facebook’s News tab. But these two developments are just part of the much larger story about Facebook’s role in distributing disinformation of all kinds, an issue that is becoming more crucial as we get closer to the 2020 presidential election. And according to one recent study, the problem is getting worse instead of better, especially when it comes to news stories about issues related to the election. Avaaz, a site that specializes in raising public awareness about global public-policy issues, says its research shiws fake news stories got 86 million views in the past three months, more than three times as many as during the previous three-month period.

The study isn’t online yet, but Avaaz supplied a preview of its research to Judd Legum, who writes the progressive newsletter Popular Information (the study was also reported on by Associated Press, Venturebeat, CNN and Vice News). According to Legum, the report says that in the first ten months of this year, “politically relevant disinformation was found to have reached over 158 million estimated views, enough to reach every reported registered voter in the US at least once.” The report looked at the top 100 fake news stories about US politics on the platform, as defined by Crowdtangle, the Facebook-owned traffic-measurement tool that tracks the network’s most popular pages and links. Avaaz says it looked at viral stories that had already been fact-checked and debunked by reputable US fact-checking organizations at the time of the study, and found that they were still drawing in vast amounts of viewership.

According to Legum’s summary of the study, Avaaz found that almost all of the fake news stories that went viral on the network — more than 90 percent — were negative, and the majority of those were about Democrats or liberals. Positive news was only a tiny proportion of the total, the study says, and 100 percent of it was about Republicans or conservatives. One significant exception to this general trend, according to Avaaz, was the top most-viewed fake story, which was about Donald Trump’s father, Fred, which came from a purported news website calling itself The American Herald Tribune. The story said the elder Trump was “a pimp and tax evader,” and that Fred’s father was a member of the Ku Klux Klan (none of these allegations are supported by any factual evidence). Despite being debunked by an official Facebook fact-checking partner, the Trump article was viewed more than 29 million times, according to Avaaz.

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

A number of Facebook’s recent decisions have fueled a storm of criticism that continues to follow the company, including the decision not to fact-check political advertising and the inclusion of Breitbart News in the company’s new “trusted sources” News tab. These controversies were stoked even further by some of the things CEO Mark Zuckerberg brought up in his speech at Georgetown University last week, where he tried — mostly unsuccessfully — to portray Facebook as a defender of free speech. CJR thought all of these topics and more were worth discussing with free-speech experts and researchers who focus on the power of platforms like Facebook, so we convened an interview series this week on our Galley discussion platform, featuring guests like Alex Stamos, former chief technology officer of Facebook, veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher, Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain, and Stanford researcher Kate Klonick.

Stamos, one of the first to raise the issue of potential Russian government involvement on Facebook’s platform while he was the head of security there, said he had a number of issues with Zuckerberg’s speech, including the fact that he “compressed all of the different products into this one blob he called Facebook. That’s not a useful frame for pretty much any discussion of how to handle speech issues.” Stamos said the News tab is arguably a completely new category of product, a curated and in some cases paid-for selection of media, and that this means the company has much more responsibility when it comes to what appears there. Stamos also said that there are “dozens of Cambridge Analyticas operating today collecting sensitive data on individuals and using it to target ads for political campaigns. They just aren’t dumb enough to get their data through breaking an API agreement with Facebook.”

Ellen Goodman, co-founder of the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy & Law, said that Mark Zuckerberg isn’t the first to have to struggle with tensions between free speech and democratic discourse, “it’s just that he’s confronting these questions without any connection to press traditions, with only recent acknowledgment that he runs a media company, in the absence of any regulation, and with his hands on personal data and technical affordances that enable microtargeting.” Kate Klonick of Stanford said Zuckerberg spoke glowingly about early First Amendment cases, but got one of the most famous — NYT v Sullivan — wrong. “The case really stands for the idea of tolerating even untrue speech in order to empower citizens to criticize political figures,” Klonick said. “It is not about privileging political figures’ speech, which of course is exactly what the new Facebook policies do.”

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

Like every other large social platform, YouTube has come under fire for not doing enough to remove videos that contain hate speech and disinformation, and the Google-owned company has said repeatedly that it is trying to get better at doing so. But in some cases, removing videos because they contain graphic imagery of violence can be a bad thing, at least when it comes to documenting war crimes in a country like Syria. That’s the case that Syrian human-rights activist and video archivist Hadi Al Khatib makes in a video that the New York Times published on Wednesday in its Opinion section. Khatib co-produced the clip with Dia Kayyali, who works for Witness, an organization that helps people use digital tools to document human rights violations. In the video, Khatib notes that videos of bombings the Syrian government has carried out on its own people—including attacks with barrel bombs, which Human Rights Watch and other groups consider to be a war crime—are important evidence, but that YouTube has removed more than 200,000 such videos.

“I’m pleading for YouTube and other companies to stop this censorship,” Khatib says in the piece. “All these takedowns amount to erasing history.” There are similar policies at Facebook and Twitter, both of which have also removed videos because they were flagged as being violent or propaganda, when those videos included evidence of government attacks in Syria and elsewhere. The problem, Kayyali says, is that most of the large social platforms use artificial intelligence to detect and remove content, but an automated filter can’t tell the difference between ISIS propaganda and a video documenting government atrocities. Many of the platforms have been placing even more emphasis on using automated filters because they are under increasing pressure from governments in the US and elsewhere to act more quickly when removing content. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg bragged to Congress last year that the company’s automated systems take down more than 90 percent of the terrorism-related content posted to the service before it is ever flagged by a human being.

Khatib runs a project called The Syrian Archive, which has been tracking and preserving as many videos of war crimes in that country as it can. But YouTube’s policies are not making it easy, he says. And user-generated content is a crucial part of the documentation of what is happening in Syria, Khatib notes, because getting access to parts of the country where such attacks are taking place is extremely dangerous, even for experienced aids agencies, journalists, and human rights organizations. YouTube hasn’t just been removing videos either: Since 2017, it has taken down a number of accounts that were trying to document the Syrian conflict, including pages run by groups such as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the Violation Documentation Center, and the Aleppo Media Center. Khatib says YouTube reinstated some of the videos it took down after he complained earlier this year, but that hundreds of thousands still remain unavailable.

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

Facebook’s relationship to speech is complicated. The giant social network routinely takes down hate speech provided it meets certain criteria (although critics say it misses a lot more), along with gratuitous nudity, and other content that breaches its “community standards.” And it hides or “down-ranks” misinformation, although only in certain categories, including anti-vaccination campaigns. But it refuses to do anything about obvious disinformation in political content, including political ads, saying it doesn’t want to be an arbiter of truth. One of the most interesting things about Mark Zuckerberg’s speech Thursday at Georgetown University was listening to the Facebook CEO try to justify these conflicting decisions. The speech, which was livestreamed on Facebook and YouTube and published in the Wall Street Journal, was at times a passionate defense of unfettered free speech, and how it played a crucial role in social movements like the Vietnam War and the civil-rights era.

If nothing else, Zuckerberg’s emotional investment in this idea came through, despite some awkward phrasing (he wrote the speech himself, and wouldn’t let anyone see or edit it because he wanted to “maximize for sincerity,” according to a Facebook source). Zuckerberg warned about a number of countries that are moving to restrict speech, and even trying to censor speech that occurs elsewhere on the internet, and his voice became almost strident as he talked about the repressive regime in China (a market Facebook has repeatedly tried to enter) and the fact that most of the top internet services used to be American, but now six of the top 10 are Chinese. “While our services, like WhatsApp, are used by protesters and activists everywhere due to strong encryption and privacy protections, on TikTok mentions of these protests are censored, even in the US,” Zuckerberg said. “Is that the internet we want?”

But the Facebook CEO also defended the network’s decision not to fact-check political ads, despite the fact that the Trump campaign has already used its ad campaigns to circulate lies about Joe Biden and his alleged involvement in corruption in Ukraine. “We don’t fact-check political ads, because we think people should be able to see for themselves what politicians are saying,” Zuckerberg said. “I know many people disagree, but, in general, I don’t think It’s right for a private company to censor politicians or the news in a democracy.” The Facebook founder also noted that similar ads appear on other services, and also run on analog TV networks. “I don’t think most people want to live in a world where you can only post things that tech companies judge to be 100 percent true,” Zuckerberg said, despite having just described how the social network routinely takes down or “down-ranks” misinformation of various kinds.

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

There has been a steady stream of Facebook-related news over the past couple of weeks: First, The Verge published transcripts of two hours of leaked audio from a town hall with CEO Mark Zuckerberg. His comments included a reference to Elizabeth Warren and her plans to break up the company, which Zuckerberg called “an existential threat.” For some, these remarks brought up the specter of potential political interference. Would Facebook try to put its thumb on the scale by using the all-powerful news feed algorithm? And while that question was still swirling, the company continued to get blowback on its recent decision to no longer fact-check political ads, triggered in part by a Trump advertising campaign running on Facebook that repeats unsubstantiated claims about Joe Biden.

In an attempt to grapple with these and other issues, CJR convened a series of interviews on our Galley discussion platform with journalists and others who follow the company. First was Casey Newton of The Verge, who got the town-hall audio scoop. Although Zuckerberg’s comments about Warren got a lot of attention, Newton said one of the most interesting things about the town hall was what the questions said about the company’s employees—that they are concerned about a breakup, but also about how they and Zuckerberg are perceived. One of our next interviewees, veteran Recode media writer Peter Kafka, said that for him, one of the most interesting things about the leak is that it happened at all—Facebook has been doing town halls for over a decade, and this is the first time an insider has leaked one. Does that mean employees are growing restless? Perhaps!

I also spoke with Dina Srinivasan, a former advertising industry executive and antitrust expert who wrote an academic paper entitled “The Antitrust Case Against Facebook,” which has been cited by several members of Congress who want to break the company up. Her argument is that antitrust law doesn’t have to focus solely on the effect a monopoly has on consumer prices (a difficult case to make for Facebook, since the service is free). Facebook could also be accused of using its monopoly to degrade the quality of its service, she says, by removing privacy protections it promised would never be weakened, and by using customer data without permission.

Note: This is something I originally published on the New Gatekeepers blog at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

When the news first broke that the MIT Media Lab had a close relationship with deceased billionaire and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, some saw it as a momentary lapse in judgment, and there was widespread support for Media Lab director Joi Ito. But then New Yorker writer Ronan Farrow reported that the Epstein relationship was much deeper than it first appeared — including the fact that Ito got a significant amount of money from Epstein for his own personal investments. Much of the earlier support evaporated, and Ito agreed to resign. And there were other spinoff effects as well: Richard Stallman, a free-software pioneer and veteran MIT professor, also resigned, after being criticized for comments he made on an internal email list that downplayed the impact of Epstein’s sexual abuse.

To explore these and other issues, CJR had a series of one-on-one and roundtable interviews — using its Galley discussion platform — with a number of journalists and other interested observers, including WBUR reporter Max Larkin, Slate writer Justin Peters, Gizmodo editor Adam Clark Estes and Stanford researcher Becca Lewis. We talked about why places like the Media Lab often get a free pass from reporters, and why there’s so much technology writing that focuses on the “hero/genius” trope, where the all-knowing founder gets credit for inventing something amazing, even if the thing they invented either doesn’t work (Theranos) and/or they are terrible people in a variety of ways (Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, etc.).

Larkin said some inside MIT were frustrated that the Epstein donations got so much attention, when the institution also recently accepted money and a visit from Saudi Arabian leader Mohammad bin Salman, who has been implicated in the vicious killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. “One Media Lab alum told me she was, on balance, more appalled by MIT’s ties to the late David Koch than by the ties to Epstein,” said Larkin, since the Kochs had done so much to undermine the Institute’s core values with their support of climate change-denying groups. And Larkin also noted that some defenders of the Epstein donations — including Media Lab founder and chairman Nicholas Negroponte — believed in what might be called the “transmutation” argument, namely that taking money from bad people and turning it into funding for creative academic pursuits was a positive thing.

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t do a lot of off-the-cuff speaking. His public appearances–whether before Congress or at a launch event–tend to be carefully scripted and rehearsed to the point where a cardboard cutout would seem animated by comparison. All of which helps explain some of the excitement surrounding a Verge report this week, consisting of two hours worth of unedited audio and transcripts of Zuckerberg addressing a town hall at Facebook, including questions from the staff. Although the scoop was heavily promoted, the transcripts didn’t contain any smoking bombshells exactly–in fact, Zuckerberg himself promoted the story in a post on his personal Facebook page, which pretty much guarantees there was nothing earth-shattering in the text.

That said, however, a number of observers highlighted one comment they found troubling: when the Facebook CEO was asked whether he was concerned about the company being broken up by government regulators, he responded that he could see federal authorities–and here he mentioned Elizabeth Warren specifically–trying such a gambit, and that if necessary he would oppose it. And then Zuckerberg said: “At the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.” Based on the context of the quote, it seems clear that the Facebook CEO meant he would fight the government’s attempt in the courts. In the full transcript, he prefaces his comment by saying one of the things he loves and appreciates about the US is “that we have a really solid rule of law,” and that he doesn’t think such a case would survive a court challenge (and he is probably right).

On Twitter and elsewhere, however, the reference to Warren and her desire to break up the company was boiled down to the point where it appeared that Zuckerberg sees Warren herself–and her presidential candidacy–as being an existential threat. The Facebook CEO’s comment brought up what some saw as a disturbing scenario. What if you almost single-handedly controlled the world’s largest information distributor, one that hundreds of millions of people rely on for their news, and one that has been implicated in the past in spreading misinformation and propaganda during an election–how might you respond to something that you perceive as an existential threat to your company?

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

While the US obsessed on Wednesday over what technically constitutes impeachment for a sitting American president, some European news publishers may have been focused on something quite different: namely, a decision by Google to play hardball with French media companies when it comes to linking to their content in its search results. As of Wednesday, unless a French publisher specifically says that it wants Google to do so, the search giant will no longer include short excerpts from news stories in its results. Instead, there will just be a headline. It’s not exactly clear how this will look in practice—in an earlier mockup of results with text from news publishers excluded, there was just a big white space where the excerpt and image were supposed to go.

Why is Google doing this? Because the French government recently passed a law that requires the search company to pay publishers if it uses even short excerpts of their content on its search pages. The French law is a local variation of a recently adopted European Union copyright directive known as Article 11, which says that publishers are entitled to compensation for the use of even small chunks of text, a payment some refer to as a “link tax.” This in turn was inspired by similar attempts in other EU countries to get Google and others to pay for excerpts. Germany tried with its Leistungsschutzrecht für Presseverleger law in 2013, and Spain tried with a similar law in 2014. In Germany, a number of publishers had their results removed from Google News when it refused to pay them, but later relented when their traffic collapsed by as much as 40 percent. In Spain, Google eventually removed Spain completely from the Google News index.

Google maintains that its news excerpts send publishers a huge amount of traffic—as the company’s head of news, Richard Gingras, pointed out in a blog post on Wednesday—and that this in turn generates revenue via advertising. Publishers, however, note that ad revenue is falling, in part because Google and Facebook control the lion’s share of the market—which is why Google also likes to highlight the Google News Initiative, through which the company funds research and development (and even the creation of entirely new local news outlets, as it is doing through partnerships in both the UK and US). The News Initiative got its start in 2006, when Belgium was the first country to sue Google for using content from local publishers without their consent. The two sides eventually settled, and Google agreed to fund research and development for the industry, and then offered similar deals to France and other countries.

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

A year and a half ago, Mark Zuckerberg floated what seemed like a crazy idea. In an interview with Ezra Klein of Vox Media, the Facebook CEO said he was thinking about creating a kind of Supreme Court for the social network—an independent body that would adjudicate some of the hard decisions about what kinds of content should or shouldn’t be allowed on the site’s pages, decisions Facebook routinely gets criticized for. Imagine, Zuckerberg said, “some sort of structure, almost like a Supreme Court, that is made up of independent folks who don’t work for Facebook, who ultimately make the final judgment call on what should be acceptable speech.” It wasn’t just a pipedream or an offhand comment: for better or worse, Facebook has been hard at work over the past year creating just such an animal, which it is now calling an “Oversight Board.” This week, it took another in a series of steps towards that goal, by publishing the charter that will govern the board’s actions, as well as a document that shows how it incorporated feedback from experts and interested parties around the world, and a description of how the governance process will work for this third-party entity.

As part of the roadshow for this effort, Facebook held an invitation-only conference call with journalists, in which the head of the governance team took pains to describe just how much work the company did to gather as much feedback as possible on the idea. Facebook held six in-depth workshops and 22 roundtables, featuring journalists, privacy experts, digital-rights activists, and constitutional scholars from 88 different countries, along with 1,200 written submissions—all of which sounds very impressive until you remember that Facebook has more than 35,000 employees and revenues of more than $56 billion. And what did the company come up with? The charter describes an independent body that will start with 11 members and eventually number as many as 40, who will hear cases in groups of five. Some cases will be referred by Facebook, while others will come from appeals launched by users whose content has been removed for a variety of reasons.

In an attempt to keep the board as independent as possible, Facebook says it will appoint two co-chairs for the board, who will then be free to select whomever they wish to fill out the rest of the board membership. And Facebook will not compensate board members directly, for fear of the perception of a conflict of interest—compensation will come from a trust that the company will set up (and fund), which will also be run independently. The charter specifically states that members can’t be removed because of specific decisions they make, but can only be disqualified if they breach the code of conduct set out in the charter. But most important of all, Facebook says, decisions made by the board are binding, which means they can’t be overruled by the company unless the changes that would be required to comply actually violate the law, or unless the board recommends something that is technically impossible.