Facebook’s oversight board may return former United States Of America President, Donald Trump to facebook. This is according to a Bloomberg report.
The panel consisting of the oversight board is structured in ways that help the former president’s chances of regaining his posting privileges.
Sometime in the coming weeks, Facebook Inc.’s new Oversight Board will announce whether Donald Trump will be allowed to post again on Facebook and Instagram. Based on its recent rulings in other cases, the board seems poised to end Facebook’s suspension of Trump, which began in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Trump’s return to social media would bolster his attempt to remain the dominant figure in the Republican Party. More broadly, it could reshape the way political speech is governed for Facebook’s 2.8 billion users, making it more difficult for the company to remove harmful content and bad actors. A pro-Trump decision could also influence other platforms, including Twitter, which permanently banned the former president after the ransacking of the Capitol, and YouTube, which said on March 4 that it would end its suspension of Trump when the risk of political violence recedes.
Facebook Inc. had ample reason to separate Trump from his 35 million followers on its namesake website, plus 24 million on Instagram. Over a period of months, he used a range of social media platforms to undermine public confidence in the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Then, having drawn thousands of followers to Washington, D.C,. in January for what he promised would be a “wild” protest, he directed the crowd to march on the Capitol, where Congress was formally counting electoral votes. Five people died in the ensuing attack, and 140 police officers were injured. Explaining its decision to suspend Trump indefinitely, Facebook said it sought to prevent “use of our platform to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government.”
But then the company referred the Trump suspension to its Oversight Board, a quasi-judicial body that it set up last year to review content moderation decisions and issue rulings the company promises to follow. The board is made up of 20 globally diverse academics, lawyers, and civic leaders, as well as a former prime minister of Denmark and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. While the board hasn’t been shy about second-guessing Facebook, overturning the company’s decisions in five out of the six cases decided so far, that top-line number can be misleading.
The board has jurisdiction only over Facebook’s decisions to remove content, meaning it’s usually decided to restore it. At least for now, the board isn’t allowed to review instances where Facebook has allowed potentially harmful material—such as incitement, hate speech, or disinformation—to remain on its platform.
Some observers have argued that Facebook designed the Oversight Board as a “clever sham” that would allow it to keep controversial content on the platform. Such content drives user engagement, which, in turn, maximizes ad revenue. That seems overstated. The relatively tiny number of cases the board is likely to decide probably won’t have a meaningful effect on the overall supply of engagement bait.
Moreover, while Facebook has vowed to obey board rulings in particular cases, the company is not obliged to apply the principles the board enunciates to millions of similar cases. Rather than a sham, the oversight body appears to reflect an impulse to outsource responsibility for content moderation—to have someone else make tough calls, at least in a handful of especially sensitive cases, like, say, the deplatforming of a former president.
