How do you solve a problem like Facebook?

There have been so many profound and unprecedented news events in the last year, but few more shocking than January 6th, 2021, when the world looked on as a mob of protestors stormed the US Capitol.

The events of that day were relived in detail last week when police officers gave powerful testimonies about what they experienced at the first congressional hearing on the insurrection. 

Nearly a year ago we launched an emergency project in the US because this was exactly what we feared would happen. We called it the Real Facebook Oversight Board and at our first press conference Larry Tribe, the then Carl M. Loeb Professor at Harvard Law School and one of the most eminent constitutional scholars in the US, said we were “watching a coup d’etat in progress”.

And as it turned out, we were. What we feared would happen did happen. And Facebook, as we’d also feared, was right at the heart of it.

What happened on January 6th was an attempted coup. It was incited by Donald Trump across social media platforms – including Facebook – and for several hours it seemed that the future of American democracy hung in the balance.

Facebook enabled Trump and others to spread misinformation and incite violence. Its algorithms drove eyeballs to fake news and inflammatory content. And the insurgents openly recruited and organised in Facebook groups. The US had an extraordinarily lucky escape. But more than six months on, Facebook still operates with absolute impunity.

The Real Facebook Oversight Board was the second major project that the Citizens launched. We pulled it together in a matter of weeks because academics, civil society groups, journalists and activists could all see that Donald Trump was using Facebook to subvert the democratic process. He spread baseless allegations of voter fraud and encouraged white supremacist groups – but there was nothing that anyone could do. And Facebook refused to take even basic steps to protect the vote. 

Our role – inspired by our work with Independent SAGE – was to bring these different experts together. We formed a broad coalition of leaders of some of the most important civil rights groups in America – NAACP, Color of Change, the Anti-Defamation League, Muslim Advocates and Free Press – with leading tech scholars, critics, activists and journalists. 

Academics like Shoshana Zuboff, a professor emerita at Harvard University and the author of Surveillance Capitalism, and Safiya Noble, an associate professor at UCLA and the author of Algorithms of Oppression. And critics like Roger McNamee, one of Facebook’s original investors, and Maria Ressa, the inspirational journalist facing jail for cyber libel in the Philippines.

These were groups and individuals with radically different ideas about both the problems and solutions, but together we agreed on three demands that we put to Facebook. On the day we launched, Facebook agreed to the first of these – banning ads seeking to delegitimise the US election – and a week later it conceded the second of them. You can read more about the Real Facebook Oversight Board in this report by Sue Halpern in the New Yorker.

Our mission at the Citizens is to find new ways to hold power to account. The absolute lack of consequences for Facebook over its role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, despite record-breaking fines, helped inspire us. And that lack of consequences is still playing out today.