A Major Ruling From Facebook’s ‘Supreme Court’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 6 May 2021

⏱️ 24 minutes

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Summary

Was Facebook right to indefinitely bar former President Donald J. Trump from the platform after the Capitol riot? The company’s oversight board, which rules on some of the thorniest speech decisions on the platform, decided that, while the ban was justified at the time, the parameters of the suspension needed to be defined. What does the ruling tell us about Facebook’s “Supreme Court.” Guest: Cecilia Kang, a reporter covering technology and regulatory policy for The New York Times.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobaro. This is The Daily.
0:10.2	Today.
0:12.2	In the biggest ruling since its creation, Facebook's oversight board
0:17.4	found that the company had no basis for indefinitely banning Donald Trump from the platform.
0:24.9	I spoke with my colleague, Technology Reporter Cecilia Cain,
0:28.9	about what that tells us about Facebook's Supreme Court.
0:43.3	It's Thursday, May 6th.
0:46.2	This is Cecilia, tell me about this oversight board that Facebook created and what it's designed to do.
0:59.6	The Facebook oversight board was created about a year ago, and it was an idea that Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg,
1:08.2	had been kicking around for much longer.
1:10.8	My goal here is to create a governance structure around the content in the community that reflects more what people in the community want.
1:20.3	He talked about it in 2018 on the Vox Podcast, the Ezra Klein Show.
1:25.5	You can imagine even some sort of structure, almost like a Supreme Court or a Peel's Board that is made up of independent folks who don't work for Facebook,
1:33.2	who ultimately get to make the final judgment call on what should be acceptable speech in a community.
1:40.0	He described it as a Supreme Court that would be an adjudicating body that makes decisions on the hardest and the thorniest and the most controversial speech decisions that Facebook made.
1:55.3	If we do that well, then I think that that could really break ground on governance for this kind of an internet community.
2:02.6	When you say speech decisions, you mean just the gnarliest, most contentious posts that get on Facebook and that people say shouldn't be there,
2:13.4	or that their posters shouldn't be allowed to post.
2:16.8	Yes, and they make hundreds of these tough decisions every day with 3 billion users.
2:22.4	These are decisions about political figures.
2:24.9	These are decisions about neo-nazis that take place every day on the website.
2:30.8	And the sheer volume that Facebook confronts of this kind of content is for the company overwhelming.
	...

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