The Empire (Facebook) Strikes Back (at the Oversight Board’s Trump Decision)
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 10 June 2021
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If you’ve listened to this show, you've probably read a fair number of news stories—and maybe even listened to some podcast episodes—about the Facebook Oversight Board’s recent ruling on the platform’s decision to ban President Trump’s account. The board temporarily allowed Facebook to keep Trump off the platform, but criticized the slapdash way Facebook made that call and provided a long list of recommendations for Facebook to respond to.
Well, now Facebook has responded—announcing that it will ban Trump from the platform for two years. And though the response hasn’t gotten as much coverage as the initial ruling, it’s arguably more important for what it says about both Facebook and the Facebook Oversight Board’s role in the future of content moderation.
This week on the Lawfare Podcast's Arbiters of Truth series on our online information ecosystem, Quinta Jurecic interviewed Lawfare managing editor Jacob Schulz and Arbiters of Truth co-host Evelyn Douek about Facebook’s response to the board. What did Facebook say in addition to its two-year Trump ban? Why is Evelyn grumpy about it? And what’s next for Facebook, the Oversight Board and Trump himself?
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Transcript
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| 1:07.4 | The decision here to punt for two years and to explicitly punt for two years in a way |
| 1:11.8 | that's going to have them set them up to by design be continuously reevaluating whether |
| 1:17.7 | or not he's deserving of these shorter term bands or whether he's deserving of a permanent |
| 1:21.7 | band. |
| 1:22.7 | That sounds like a disaster of not escaping one person who already sucks up so much of |
| 1:28.9 | the attention in sort of the platform governance discussion in general. |
| 1:33.0 | I'm Quinti Jurassic and this is the LawFair podcast June 10th 2021. |
| 1:41.2 | If you're listening to this show, you probably read a fair amount of news stories and maybe |
| 1:45.7 | even listen to a fair amount of podcast episodes about the Facebook oversight boards recent |
| 1:50.8 | ruling on the platform's decision to ban President Trump's account. |
| 1:56.2 | The board temporarily allowed Facebook to keep Trump off of the platform but criticized |
... |
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