Facebook’s Civil Rights Audit Led by Sheryl Sandberg, the Civil Rights Task Force continues to serve as a forum for leaders of key departments within the company to discuss civil rights issues, identify potential solutions, share lessons learned, and engage in cross-functional coordination and decision-making on civil rights issues. According to Facebook, the Task Force has discussed issues, including new policies and product features, stronger processes that the company could implement, and recent concerns raised by external stakeholders, including civil rights advocates. The membership of the Task Force has evolved over the last year; Facebook reports that it now includes both: • Decision-makers and executives overseeing departments such as Product, Advertising, Diversity & Inclusion, Legal, and Policy and Communications. • A cross-functional team of product and policy managers that have been responsible for the implementation of several commitments listed in the previous report as well as a subset of new commitments made in this report. This group represents various functions including key teams working on elections, hate speech, algorithmic bias, and advertising. Facebook reports that since March 2019, members of the Task Force have consistently met on a monthly basis. The Task Force’s efforts over the past year include: • Supporting the development of Facebook’s new census interference policy by engaging with key questions regarding the scope and efficacy of the policy. • Engaging with the civil rights community in various forums including Facebook’s first ever public civil rights convening in Atlanta in September 2019 and in working sessions with the Auditors and sub-groups within the Task Force over the last 12 months. • Driving cross-functional coordination across teams so that Facebook could be more responsive to stakeholder requests and concerns. For example, Facebook reports that in 2020 a subset of the Task Force has met weekly with subject matter experts from policy, product and operations to specifically address and make progress on a set of voter suppression proposals suggested by the Auditors. • Advocating for and supporting all of the work behind the Civil Rights Audit — and helping to remove internal barriers to progress. • Developing the strategy and implementation plan for several of the key commitments outlined in this report, including the implementation of Facebook’s census policy and the new commitments outlined in the Elections and Census Chapter below. Facebook also has begun to increase its in-house civil rights expertise. It has hired voting and census expert consultants, who are developing trainings for key employees and will be supporting efforts to prevent and address voting/census suppression and misinformation on the platform. In addition, Facebook has started to embed civil rights knowledge on core teams. As discussed in more detail below, the Audit Team maintains that bringing civil 14