A former Guardian editor who’s on Facebook Inc.’s Oversight Board said today that the board now wants to get a better understanding of the company’s algorithm for which posts run on its News Feed.

Talking to the House of Lords communications and digital committee and later quoted by the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger said he and the other members of the 20-person board are “frustrated” at looking only at certain posts and being given the decision to leave content up or take it down.

“What happens if you want to make something less viral?” he said. “What happens if you want to put up an interstitial? What happens if, without commenting on any high-profile current cases, you didn’t want to ban someone for life but wanted to put them in a ‘sin bin’ so that if they misbehave again you can chuck them off?”

He said these are the kinds of questions he and the others want to ask Facebook, adding that the board will need to get their “feet under the table” first. “At some point, we’re going to ask to see the algorithm, I feel sure, whatever that means,” he said. “Whether we’ll understand when we see it is a different matter.”

The Oversight Board was given its first batch of cases late last year, with the ones being chosen to be put under review seen as having “critical importance” in terms of public discourse and how Facebook’s policies work. Sometime later, the board overturned four out of five of Facebook’s decisions, cases that spanned Asia, Europe, North America and South America.

That in itself could be a step in the right direction, but Rusbridger said it’s not enough in the face of not actually understanding algorithmic moderation. He said if they want to examine more closely how it works, they will need people on the board who are more tech-savvy. For that reason, he said, the board is presently looking for 20 more members.

“People say to me, ‘Oh, you’re on the board, but it’s well-known that the algorithms reward emotional content that polarizes communities because that makes it more addictive,’” he said. “Well, I don’t know if that’s true or not, and as a board we’re going to have to get to grips with that.”

Photo: Jorge Caballero Jiménez/Flickr