I love the idea of impartiality, that notion of fairness above all, of equal treatment of all rivals or disputants. The notion of impartiality is difficult to define in practice; we all have our biases. And then there’s the politics of any given situation. It’s fair to say that, given global events, impartiality is becoming increasingly hard to come by. This is especially the case in the Middle East, where the number of conflicts and disputes is sadly increasing between neighbors and nations. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to be perceived as impartial.

Of course, social media hasn’t helped. Social media is the metaphorical can of kerosene that makes disputes explode across cyberspace. But now, the social media companies want to start cracking down on content that fuels hatred and extremism. What is Facebook’s idea? To introduce “an independent oversight board of experts to review its content decisions.”

In a fairly wide-ranging interview with Abu Dhabi’s The National, Brent C Harris, Director for Global Affairs and Governance at Facebook, spoke about Facebook’s plans to reach out to stakeholders who’d play a role on this oversight board. I’ll quote from him.

The company is embracing a wider set of approaches for how it operates. Our CEO Mark [Zuckerberg] had a comment on the earnings call recently where he talked about how, for when we launch products now that touch societal issues, we are going to go out and consult on them and think in advance about how to build them.

We had discussions pretty much every week internally, and one of the ideas that was proposed was that we should create some board to do a review of really difficult content decisions. I think there was an emerging consensus that it was something worth trying and worth building.

There was a growing sense that the [content] decisions we were taking are ones that we shouldn’t make alone and I don’t think that speaks to any single issue. It is about a growing belief that we don’t believe the decisions should sit solely inside Facebook.

A lot of the matters that will go before the board are the hard questions of trade-offs between those principles and trying to figure out for a specific piece of content, where do you set that line? That line is a hard one at times to figure out.

There has also been fairly consistent set of feedback that the people who should serve [on the board] should be folks who are deeply deliberative and who are impartial.

While I usually applaud any social media firm for opening up and engaging with more transparency, this suggestion of an “impartial board” is also dangerous. Who decides who and what is impartial? Given what is happening in many regions, including my own, how will Facebook ensure that politics doesn’t seep into discussions? Many state actors have manipulated social media for their own ends, and Facebook itself has a terrible track record of sustaining partners with external stakeholders (mainly because it doesn’t seem to listen, just ask Snopes). And, how do you define impartiality in a region which has never been so afflicted by political and sectarian differences?

If they’re going to be transparent about this issue, then Facebook needs to go all in and clearly state who they’re meeting and why (particularly in regions where there’s little to no independent civil society). Otherwise, it just strikes me as another public relations exercise rather than a workable plan which will produce the intended results (and given trust in Facebook is probably at an all-time low, this is not what they need).

And, speaking as a person who cares deeply about the notion of impartiality and fairness on social media, the last thing we need is more news columns on bad ideas which won’t deliver in practice. Facebook, prove me wrong.