‘You Can’t Piss Off The Advertisers’: Facebook Oversight Board Members Offer Advice for Elon Musk (That He’ll Surely Ignore)

Photo by Hannibal Hanschke-Pool/Getty Images

To call Elon Musk’s tenure so far as the self-declared “Chief Twit” of Twitter tumultuous would be an understatement. But on the rare chance that the SpaceX and Tesla CEO is willing to listen to advice, several members of the Facebook Oversight Board offered their expertise on how Musk might navigate the complicated waters of content moderation.

After completing his $44 billion takeover of the social media giant, Musk dissolved the board of directors, fired most of the company’s top executives, and declared himself the sole director. He followed up with a massive layoff, reportedly letting go roughly half of Twitter’s workforce via email this Friday. Oh, and then there’s his highly controversial plan to convert Twitter’s “blue check” verified accounts into a monthly $8 subscription.

The possible elimination of the longstanding verification system plus the elimination of thousands of employees who have knowledge and experience in handling the firehose of content uploaded to Twitter every nanosecond — including text, video, photos, and links, all of which could contain bigoted, illegal, offensive, misleading, or inaccurate content — less than a week before the U.S. midterm elections has raised alarms among many political commentators and tech industry observers.

Musk’s first step in deciding how to manage content on Twitter should be to “start with the principle of not doing harm,” members of Facebook’s “Independent Oversight Board” told Axios on Friday during a panel at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon, Portugal.

Facebook launched its Oversight Board as an independent review board to handle appeals of the platform’s content moderation decisions. One of their most noteworthy (or notorious, depending on your personal views of America’s 45th president) was regarding the suspension of former President Donald Trump. Trump was excommunicated from Facebook and most other major social media platforms in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, due to posts he wrote that were judged to have incited the violence. In May 2021, the Oversight Board upheld Trump’s ban but also urged the company to develop “clear, necessary, and proportionate policies” regarding account suspensions, and set a deadline for Jan. 2023 to review Trump’s specific ban.

Twitter also banned Trump after Jan. 6, and Musk has openly pondered reinstating the ex-president’s account.

Dex Hunter-Torricke, head of communications for the Facebook Oversight Board, told the Axios panel that he and his fellow board members had advised Meta (Facebook’s parent company) “if and when Trump is allowed back, you need to ensure that he will not cause more violence.” According to Hunter-Torricke, one plan being considered is to allow Trump to come back on Facebook but with certain conditions, and if he violated those rules, his account would go right back to the Oversight Board for a new review (and presumably a re-suspension).

Musk has talked about creating his own content moderation council with “diverse” viewpoints, but seems to be following the old internal company mantra of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg of “move fast and break things” — a saying which Zuckerberg himself abandoned.

Moving fast does indeed often result in breaking things, as Hunter-Torricke noted, and that wasn’t always a good thing.

Another member of the board highlighted how this could directly impact Twitter’s ability to earn revenue:

“You can’t piss off the advertisers” and constantly change your mind about the rules, said Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Prospect UK, a member of the Oversight Board and former editor of the Guardian.

“It took Mark Zuckerberg 15 years to figure out he needed an independent group of experts to solve content moderation problems,” Rusbridger said. “It took Elon Musk three days.”

If Musk — who recently changed his bio to “Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator” — does want to listen to the advice of these Facebook advisers, Axios reported that Hunter-Torricke commented that their board was “open to working with platforms other than Meta, and would welcome conversations with Musk.”

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