facebook oversight trump boarddoueklawfare

Facebook considers statements like “We are working to enhance our automated tools to improve our proactive review of content that could potentially impact public safety” as fully implementing a recommendation. This holds true with Facebook’s “responses” this time around. I’ve previously written about how Facebook’s interpretation of its own commitments is more generous than mine. The headline is that Facebook says it is “committed to fully implementing” 15 out of 19 recommendations, adopting one recommendation in part, still assessing two recommendations and taking no action on one.

So, this post is about the 20-page document buried at the end of Facebook’s announcement today and those 20 pages constitute a largely milquetoast response from Facebook to the FOB’s substantial policy recommendations. If anything, I read the two-year suspension announcement as a distraction from the disappointing nature of the rest of what Facebook had to say in response to the Oversight Board decision. There will be more than enough commentary about that. Much of the public attention on Facebook’s responses today has focused on this.īut this post is not about the politics of the decision to suspend Trump’s account for 2 years. Today, Facebook bit the bullet early: it suspended Trump’s account for 2 years. The FOB gave Facebook six months to work it out. When the decision came out, much of the attention was focused on the fact that the FOB kicked the ball back to Facebook to decide what to do with Trump’s account. Today was the 30-day deadline for Facebook’s responses to the policy recommendations in the FOB’s decision on the suspension of Trump’s account. It’s Facebook’s responses that make clear whether it’s engaging in the FOB process in good faith or whether the FOB is just Facebook’s very expensive agony aunt whose advice it only follows when it feels like it. Despite often getting far less attention than the release of the decisions themselves, these responses are the most important part of the whole FOB experiment. The bulk and most consequential parts of the FOB’s decisions are non-binding policy recommendations Facebook need not abide by them but does have an obligation to respond to them within 30 days. Trump had vowed to launch his own social media site but has so far only launched a website showcasing a feed of his comments, messages styled like the ones he used to publish on Twitter and Facebook but ungirded by the digital framework that allowed the former president’s comments to achieve a far reach.One of the many ways that the Facebook Oversight Board (FOB) is different from many courts of law, let alone the Supreme Court, is that except on the narrowest of issues (the fate of the individual piece of content or account in a case) it doesn’t have the last word. Trump’s departure from social media has left the president oddly silent, removing what was a daily presence in the lives of many Americans. “We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great,” Zuckerberg said in a post on Facebook first announcing the ban. The breaking point did not come until he used Facebook to communicate with the mob at the Capitol on January 6, resulting in his indefinite suspension. (“When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” the president famously wrote.) Trump continued throughout the year to use Facebook to spread misinformation about the pandemic and the presidential election’s result, actions similar to ones he’s taken since entering politics. Yet in June 2020, Facebook left up a post from Trump that seemed to encourage violence against protestors attending Black Lives Matter rallies. For many years, CEO Mark Zuckerberg largely declined to do so, but in the run-up to the 2020 election, Facebook took a number of steps to curb some types of misinformation, adding fact-check labels, reducing the frequency of some content in users’ feeds and launching prominent pages of vetted information on key topics, like the election. Facebook has a checkered past with policing content on its platform.

Facebook oversight trump boarddoueklawfare