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Facebook Oversight Board

lucypei
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An oversight board of 20 well-known, reputable individuals has been (publically) convened to make final decisions about contested content removal from the platform. 

Critics note that content removal is not the only ethical issue Facebook has, and Siva Vaidhyanathan notes that the proprietary algorithm that shows people content is a serious issue over which this board has no authority. 

Joan Donovan notes that the slow legalistic pace will not keep up even when damaging content is a serious ethical issue, as even only a few hours is sufficient for viral digital content to reach huge audiences: 

Joan Donovan, the research director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center and an expert on media manipulation, raised concerns that the board would become “weaponized” by bad actors, who will use it as another opportunity to get their issues into the press.

“This theory of oversight is heavily informed by legal scholarship, which is slow and administrative and technical in nature, when we need something much more suited to the speed of the technology itself,” she said. “They’re going forward with this really long drawn out procedural mechanism that doesn’t address what the problem is – which is that viral content only needs to be on the internet for 4-8 hours for it to do its damage.”

Looking at the scale of the “infodemic” facing Facebook amid the coronavirus pandemic, Donovan said that the much more pressing concern is to solve the problem of “information curation, especially in a place like Facebook, that helps guide the user toward correct content and information rather than putting them in the middle a landfill and saying, ‘You sort it out’.” The oversight board is ultimately a distraction from “what really needs to happen”, she said, “which is to design technology that doesn’t allow for the expansive amplification of disinformation and health misinformation”.

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Andreas_Rebmann
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Emily Goldmann is a PhD and MPH (Master of Public Health) at the College of Global Public Health. She focuses on environmental and social causes of mental health and their consequences. While she doesn't focus on disasters, her studies intersect with those in which we are interested in: Global Health and causes of mental health disorders.

Sandro Galea is a physician and epidemiologist at Boston School of Public Health. He has a long list of other positions of research at other colleges as well. He focuses on how the social aspects of a community create mental disorders, particularly urban communities where mood-anxiety and substance abuse disorders are common. He has a particular focus also upon mass-trauma and disasters and how they affect the mental health of the world long term, such as 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina. He studies precisely what is relevant to the DSTS Network in these cases, where he looks at the mental health consequences instead of the physical consequences of these disasters.

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Andreas_Rebmann
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The understanding of disasters and their relation to global mental health, both to those who suffered directly from then and to those who were part of the greater community of those who suffered, is constantly evolving. Analyzation of past research and the current methods of study allow the global community to effectively understand and treat mental health on a large scale.

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Andreas_Rebmann
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"At this point, the burden of mental disorders after disasters has been well documented, and interest in the course of trajectory of psychological symptoms following disasters is growing."

"Persons who live in a community where a disaster hsa occured may differ in their degree of exposure in the event. They may be affected directly, being present at the disaster site, or indirectly, having loved ones present at the disaster site or seeing images of the disaster in the media."

"Ongoing stressors such as job loss, property damage, marital stress, physical health conditions related to the disaster, and displacement are often experienced by those affected by the disaster... Low levels of and reductions in social support are also associated iwth post-disaster psychological symptoms."