Noah Feldman, Sophie-Charlotte Fischer, Gillian Hadfield on The Design of Facebook’s Oversight Board

In September 2019, Facebook announced that it was establishing an independent Facebook Oversight Board, with the power to make binding decisions on content moderation. Noah Feldman, one of the Board’s architects, discusses the background of Facebook’s decision and whether other platforms will follow suit. Noah also presents his approach to designing institutions to improve and legitimize complex controversial decisions by Big Tech companies and sketches out what a meaningful review board for the AI industry would look like.

Noah Feldman is an American author, columnist, public intellectual, and host of the podcast Deep Background. He is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Chairman of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His work is devoted to constitutional law, with an emphasis on free speech, law & religion, and the history of constitutional ideas.

Sophie-Charlotte Fischer is a PhD candidate at the Center for Security Studies (CSS), ETH Zurich and a Research Affiliate at the Centre for the Governance of AI. She holds a Master’s degree in International Security Studies from Sciences Po Paris and a Bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences from University College Maastricht. Sophie is an alumna of the German National Academic Foundation.

Gillian Hadfield is the director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. She is the Schwartz Reisman Chair in Technology and Society, professor of law and of strategic management at the University of Toronto, a faculty affiliate at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and a senior policy advisor at OpenAI. Her current research is focused on innovative design for legal and regulatory systems for AI and other complex global technologies; computational models of human normative systems; and working with machine learning researchers to build ML systems that understand and respond to human norms.