The Facebook Oversight Board, One Year On
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 November 2021
⏱️ 58 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
It’s been roughly a year since the Facebook Oversight Board opened its doors for business—and while you may mostly remember the board from its decision on Donald Trump’s suspension from Facebook, but there’s been a lot going on since then. So we thought it was a good time to check in on how this experiment in platform governance is faring. In October, the Board released its first transparency report, and Facebook—now Meta—has published its own update on how it’s been responding to the Board’s decisions and recommendations. Meanwhile, Lawfare is keeping track of developments on our Facebook Oversight Board Blog, run by the inimitable Tia Sewell.
On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic talked about what the data shows about what cases the Board is taking, how the Board’s role seems to be evolving, and, of course, whether we’re going to have to start calling this the Meta Oversight Board, thanks to Facebook’s name change.
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Transcript
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| 0:18.2 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:32.6 | This is actually a very hard issue and I'm glad that Facebook has referred the question |
| 0:38.2 | to the board because I think there are legitimate trade-offs here, right? |
| 0:41.1 | Like on the one hand, it obviously looks extremely bad to have a small subset of users, high |
| 0:46.8 | profile, powerful people that are subject to a special system that gives them priority |
| 0:52.1 | and in fact the way that it played out in practice was because the system was completely |
| 0:56.8 | overwhelmed and basically amounted to a white list where these people could basically post |
| 1:01.4 | whatever they wanted. |
| 1:02.4 | Like that looks terrible. |
| 1:04.4 | I'm Quinto Jurassic and this is the LawFair podcast November 18th, 2021. |
| 1:12.8 | We're bringing you another episode of Arrouders of Truth, our series on the online information |
| 1:17.2 | ecosystem. |
| 1:18.2 | It's been roughly a year since the Facebook oversight board opened its stores for business. |
| 1:23.9 | And while you may mostly remember the board from its decision on Donald Trump's suspension |
| 1:27.8 | from Facebook, there's been a lot going on since then. |
| 1:31.3 | So we thought it was a good time to check in on how this experiment and platform governance |
| 1:34.9 | is fairing. |
| 1:36.6 | In October, the board released its first transparency report and Facebook, now Meta, has published |
... |
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