On August 27 of this year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee acknowledging that Facebook had yielded to pressure from the Biden Administration to censor COVID-related content and suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story. The Hunter Biden story, published just before the 2020 presidential election, was dismissed by more than 50 former national security officials, establishment media figures, progressive NGOs, and professional fact-checkers as “misinformation”, but later proved to be true.

We welcome Mr. Zuckerberg’s expression of regret and see this as an opportunity for reform and to reestablish trust with users and the community-at-large. The recommendations outlined below would improve transparency and accountability and reassure the public of Facebook’s future commitment to free speech and expression.

We recognize that under current legislation it is Meta’s First Amendment right to moderate content as it so chooses, as such these suggestions aim to highlight how Meta might better utilize that prerogative. Longer term there are questions regarding Section 230 and possible common carrier status that need to be resolved. 

The recommendations are as follows:

1. Appoint an independent team to investigate politically or ideologically motivated content suppression on Meta platforms that may have been conducted as part of efforts to counter misinformation and disinformation, whether alone or in collaboration with government, academia, or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
2. Publicly disclose all nonpublic portals used for communication with government officials, and close these portals except in cases involving criminal activity.
3. Make public any short- or long-term agreements where government, non-profit or academic researchers have been granted special or exclusive access to Meta product data or APIs.
4. Commit to publicly disclosing current and past communication portals between Meta employees and NGO or government officials related to content moderation of First Amendment-protected speech. A new section of the Facebook website should be created to catalog this information and make it permanently available to the public.
5. Make available all internal communications between Meta employees and U.S. government officials related to any free speech-related lawsuit, such as Murthy v. Missouri.
6. Dissolve the Oversight Board and develop a decentralized, multiple-viewpoint oversight system. Zuckerberg’s letter acknowledged significant failures in content moderation that the current Oversight Board did not address.
   
7. Remove existing “fact-checks”, flags, tags, or other algorithmic ranking methods relating to legal speech from user posts, and end privileged “fact-checking” access to politicized organizations. If real-time annotation is needed, we suggest an organic and representative crowd-sourced system that can display multiple viewpoints.
8. Desist from posting site-wide government announcements and politicized interactive user content, such election announcements and profile frames. Government announcements should be reserved solely for catastrophic events like natural disasters or instances of imminent danger to life or property.
9. Meta should aim to set new industry norms by revealing the revolving door between the federal government and Silicon Valley, committing to the yearly public disclosure of current employees who have worked in a government agency at GS-14, equivalent, or above, for two or more years, and where they have worked.
10. Strengthen existing whistleblower protection policies to explicitly cover current or former employees who expose content moderation policy violations within Meta.
11. Cease all corporate-level financial contributions to political candidates, parties, and committees, given Meta’s massive size and ability to influence the global flow of information and the political consciousness of its users.
12. Broaden transparency reporting through Meta’s “Transparency Center” by:
    • Committing to release quarterly public reports detailing the volume of political posts and how they are moderated, allowing multiple independent third-party audits of these reports; and
    • Making internal content ranking algorithms open-source and allowing independent third-party stakeholders to analyze and provide feedback.
13. Empower users by reimagining the Facebook timeline as well as other similar components of Meta products where information is curated by algorithm for users, specifically:
    • Restoring “Most Recent” as a default timeline option, allowing users to easily see an uncurated, non-algorithmic, chronological timeline on the homepage;
    • Developing robust new tools that allow users to filter their own timeline based on their own preferences, instead of deploying top-down content moderation and filtering; and
    • Allowing users to view, in a simple and easily digestible way, the process behind the curation of their feeds.