The Least Dangerous Branch … of Facebook
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 29 January 2021
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Yesterday was a big day—the day that the Facebook Oversight Board released its first decisions. The independent board, an experiment in platform governance set up by Facebook, handed down five rulings weighing in on the company’s decision to remove various posts for violating Facebook’s community guidelines. It may not be Marbury v. Madison, but it’s still a big moment for online speech regulation.
To mark the occasion, Lawfare is setting up a new page collecting and tracking the board’s decisions.
For this episode of the podcast, Quinta Jurecic spoke with Evelyn Douek, cohost of Lawfare’s Arbiters of Truth podcast series on disinformation and a lecturer at Harvard Law School, and Lawfare deputy managing editor Jacob Schulz. They discussed everything you need to know about the Oversight Board, including those most basic but crucial of questions: What exactly is it, anyway? What’s in the decisions? And why should we care?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:14.7 | That's patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:18.2 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no ball and the aftermath. |
| 0:34.1 | Someone asked the board, has the board put any thought into how Facebook would operationalize |
| 0:40.5 | its decisions? |
| 0:42.1 | And the response was, in a word, no. |
| 0:46.6 | The board just does not see its role as considering the operationalizability of its decisions. |
| 0:53.6 | It sees that as Facebook's problem, which might be fair enough, you know, it isn't |
| 0:57.8 | charged with designing the entire content moderation system. |
| 1:01.8 | At the same time, if it goes about in all of its decisions making recommendations that |
| 1:07.1 | literally can't be enforced, then they won't be enforced, and over time that would significantly |
| 1:13.3 | undermine its authority. |
| 1:15.6 | Time quench a Jurassic, and this is the LawFair podcast, January 29, 2021. |
| 1:23.8 | Yesterday was a big day. |
| 1:25.8 | The day that the Facebook oversight board released its first decisions. |
| 1:30.2 | The independent board, an experiment and platform governance set up by Facebook, handed down |
| 1:35.4 | five rulings weighing in on the company's decision to remove various posts for violating |
| 1:40.9 | Facebook's community guidelines. |
| 1:43.4 | It may not be Marbury vs. Madison, but it's still a big moment for online speech regulation. |
| 1:49.7 | To mark the occasion, LawFair is setting up a new page collecting and tracking the board's |
... |
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