The Facebook Oversight Board Rules on Trump
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 6 May 2021
⏱️ 45 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
The wait is over. Four months after Facebook indefinitely banned Donald Trump from its platform following the Capitol riot, the Facebook Oversight Board—the platform’s self-appointed quasi-court—has weighed in on whether or not it was permissible for Facebook to do so. And the answer is ... complicated. Mark Zuckerberg can still keep Trump off his platform for now, but the board says that Facebook must review its policies and make a final decision about the former president’s fate within six months.
To discuss the decision, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes hosted a special episode of Arbiters of Truth, our Lawfare Podcast miniseries on our online information ecosystem. He sat down with Evelyn Douek, Quinta Jurecic and Lawfare Deputy Managing Editor Jacob Schulz for a conversation about the Oversight Board’s ruling. Did the Oversight Board make the right call? What might the mood be like in Facebook headquarters right now? What about Twitter’s? And is this decision really the Oversight Board’s Marbury v. Madison moment?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising. |
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| 0:18.0 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, |
| 0:22.0 | rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:29.0 | In throwing the decision back to Facebook, the board gave Facebook absolutely no guidance whatsoever on what its policy should be. |
| 0:43.0 | It could have said a bunch of things like, we want you to develop a new world leader policy, |
| 0:48.0 | something to do here with what you're going to do with accounts that violate your rules multiple times, |
| 0:53.0 | and here is sort of the ambit that you should operate within, |
| 0:56.0 | and it absolutely didn't do that at all. It completely declined to give any guidance at all, |
| 1:03.0 | and that's why I think it's a real problem for Facebook at this point. |
| 1:08.0 | I'm Quintia Jurassic, and this is the LawFair podcast, May 6, 2021. |
| 1:15.0 | The wait is over. |
| 1:17.0 | Four months after Facebook indefinitely banned Donald Trump from its platform following the Capitol riot. |
| 1:22.0 | The Facebook oversight board, the platform self-appointed quasi-court, |
| 1:27.0 | has weighed in on whether or not it was permissible for Facebook to do so. |
| 1:31.0 | And the answer is, complicated. |
| 1:34.0 | Mark Zuckerberg can still keep Trump off his platform for now, |
| 1:38.0 | but the board says that Facebook must review its policies and make a final decision about the former president's fate within six months. |
| 1:45.0 | To discuss the decision, we convened a special episode of Arbiter's of Truth. |
| 1:49.0 | Our LawFair podcast mini-series on our online information ecosystem. |
... |
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