[4] Zuckerberg originally described it as a kind of "Supreme Court", given its role in settlement, negotiation, and mediation, including the power to override the company's decisions.
The board officially began its work on October 22, 2020,[6] and issued its first five decisions on January 28, 2021, with four out of the five overturning Facebook's actions with respect to the matters appealed.
[7] It has been subject to substantial media speculation and coverage since its announcement, and has remained so following the referral of Facebook's decision to suspend Donald Trump after the 2021 United States Capitol attack.
[9][7][10] Among the board's goals were to improve the fairness of the appeals process, give oversight and accountability from an outside source, and increase transparency.
[11] Between late 2017 and early 2018, Facebook had hired Brent C. Harris, who had previously worked on the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, and as an advisor to non-profits, to become the company's Director of Global Affairs.
[15] In January 2019, Facebook received a draft charter for the board[16] and began a period of public consultations and workshops with experts, institutions, and people around the world.
[31][29] The photographs were asserted to show breast cancer symptoms, and indicated this in text in Portuguese, which the website's automated review system failed to understand.
[7] On February 12, 2021, the Board overturned the removal of a Facebook forum post made in October 2020, containing an image of a TV character holding a sheathed sword, with Hindi text translated as stating "if the tongue of the kafir starts against the Prophet, then the sword should be taken out of the sheath", with hashtags equating French President Emmanuel Macron to the devil, and calling for a boycott of products from France.
[32] On April 13, 2021, the board upheld the removal of a Facebook post by a Dutch Facebook containing a 17-second video of a child and three adults wearing traditional Dutch "Sinterklaas" costumes, including two white adults dressed as Zwarte Piet (Black Pete), with faces painted black and wearing Afro wigs.
[34][35] On January 6, 2021, amidst an attack at the Capitol while Congress was counting the electoral votes, Trump posted a short video to social media in which he praised the rioters, despite urging them to end the violence, and reiterated his baseless claim that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent.
[38] On April 16, 2021, the board announced that it was delaying the decision on whether to overturn Trump's suspensions on Facebook and Instagram to sometime "in the coming weeks" in order to review the more than 9,000 public comments it had received.
[39] Notably, on January 27, 2021, incoming board member Suzanne Nossel had published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times titled "Banning Trump from Facebook may feel good.
[48] In October 2021, the board announced that it would be meeting with former Facebook employee and whistleblower, Frances Haugen, to discuss her statements about the company that she previously shared with The Wall Street Journal and United States Senate Commerce Committee's Sub-Committee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security.
[51] In order to ensure the board's independence, Facebook established an irrevocable trust with $130 million in initial funding, expected to cover operational costs for over half a decade.
[56] On April 13, 2021, the Oversight Board announced that it would start accepting appeals by users seeking to take down other people's content that had not been removed following an objection.
[57] The charter provides for future candidates to be nominated for board membership, through a recommendations portal operated by the U.S. law firm Baker McKenzie.
[60] On April 20, 2021, its newest board member, PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel, was appointed to replace Pamela S. Karlan, who had resigned in February 2021 to join the Biden administration.
Facebook's introduction of the Oversight Board elicited a variety of responses, with St. John's University law professor Kate Klonick describing its creation as an historic endeavor,[65] and technology news website The Verge deeming it "a wild new experiment in platform governance".