Mark Zuckerburg, on Wednesday, announced the names of all the members for the Oversight Board which will be an Independent body. The Oversight Board includes former judges, a former Prime Minister, non-profit leaders, academics and journalists. Sudhir Krishnaswamy is the only Indian to be a member of the body.
The social media giant in a Facebook post on Wednesday wrote, "In 2018, I outlined the idea for an independent Oversight Board. Since then, we've consulted with thousands of academics, NGOs and other experts around the world."
Who is Sudhir Krishnaswamy?
Sudhir Krishnaswamy co-founded Centre for Law and Policy Research and is also a partner at Ashira Law. Currently, he works as a faculty member at the Azim Premji University. He was also the Dr B.R. Ambedkar visiting faculty teaching Indian constitutional law at Columbia Law School. Krishnaswamy also heads as the vice-chancellor of National Law School India University in Bengaluru.
He graduated from the National Law School of India University and later obtained a D.Phil from Oxford University in 2008.
During the last couple of years, Krishnaswamy has also worked in the Prime Minister's Committee on Infrastructure and the Kasturirangan Committee under the Bangalore Government. Subjects under his interest are constitutional law, legal education, legal theory, intellectual property law and administrative law.
What is Facebook's Oversight Board?
Since the use of social media is increasing by the minute throughout the world, the spread of hateful and harmful content is also increasing. In times like this, who looks after the content and segregates what should be kept up or not? Each post on social media affects people and communities; thus, Facebook came up with an Independent body who will make these decisions.
Why do we need an Oversight Board?
Oversight Board is essentially a moderating body for Facebook and Instagram. The body will take independent and binding decisions on whether specific content should be uploaded or removed from Facebook and Instagram.
All the members are independent of Facebook and will bring unique perspectives and insights that will help the difficult decision-making process. They will review all the content referred to them by Facebook and also by the users.
In today's online world - hate comments, body shaming, glorifying rape culture, spreading of misconceptions and fake news is rapidly increasing, the need for an independent decision body had peaked, and this is where the Oversight Board steps in.