This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, May 5th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Facebook Oversight Board was tasked with determining if Facebook itself had made an appropriate decision in pulling

Donald Trump's account in the wake of the January 6th violence at the Capitol.

They said it was appropriate but also told Facebook to make some changes.

Cato's John Samples is a member of the Facebook Oversight Board.

We spoke this morning.

We should begin this recording with the necessary housekeeping related to your two roles for the Cato Institute and Facebook's oversight role.

If you could characterize your positions for the purposes of this discussion that would be helpful.

I've been at the Cato Institute for 20 years working on policy analysis largely in the area of free speech.

About two years ago, Facebook decided that it's content moderation, that is, the rules it has about what you can say on the platform

and what you cannot say, needed some external evaluation.

And so they set up what is called an oversight board and the job of the

Oversight Board is to assess if whether Facebook is following its own rules regarding content moderation again taking stuff down or letting stuff stay up

According to also according to international norms about freedom of speech.

So I was asked to join this board and then about a month or two after it began its actual work, the case of Mr. Trump and

January 6th and the Capitol, and Facebook's actions really during that day which is the focus came to us.

So we had to decide whether Facebook essentially took away his account that day,

January 6th, and we had, our job was to decide

whether Facebook had made a mistake or not.

So this was clearly in reaction to the events of January 6th where hundreds of people broke into the capital.

There were threats of violence against members of Congress, even the Vice President, and within days,

...