The People Who Will Decide Donald Trump's Fate on Facebook

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 12 February 2021

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Facebook created the Oversight Board to adjudicate high-level claims about what can and can’t be posted, independent of the company’s leadership. This is a big deal: when Donald Trump was displeased by one of the board’s appointees, he contacted Mark Zuckerberg directly, as Kate Klonick learned in her reporting. And then Trump himself became the new board’s biggest test case. Facebook asked the board to rule on whether the former President should be reinstated, after he was banned from the platform for his role in inciting the Capitol riot. Klonick, an assistant professor of law at St. John’s University, had an unusual degree of access to Facebook to document the creation of the board. She talked with David Remnick about how independent the Oversight Board can be, how it may rule on Donald Trump, and why it’s so hard to get Jewish space lasers off Facebook.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I'm David Remnick, and thanks for joining me.
0:13.0	The question of how Facebook moderates content on its platform has been, to say the least, vexed from the start.
0:20.4	The company has about 15,000 moderators all
0:23.4	around the world, and they respond to concerns that are raised about anything and everything by users.
0:29.9	They could range from a photograph of a mother breastfeeding to the incitments of
0:33.9	massacres in certain countries. And in this country's partisan battles, Facebook is routinely
0:40.4	accused of censoring conservatives, but also of complicity in the disinformation campaigns that have
0:47.2	benefited Donald Trump. Mark Zuckerberg's idea of how to get out of this terrible mess is something
0:53.1	called the oversight board.
0:55.2	It's an independent body that at the moment has about 20 members from law, academia, politics, and journalism.
1:02.4	Their decisions are supposed to be binding on Facebook, right up to Mark Zuckerberg himself, the CEO.
1:08.0	And inevitably, it's been called the Supreme Court of Facebook.
1:12.6	The Supreme Court was having a relatively quiet launch when Facebook banned Donald Trump
1:18.5	in the aftermath of the January riot of the U.S. Capitol.
1:22.5	And suddenly, this brand-new group got the biggest case of all, whether the former president should remain
1:29.2	banned indefinitely or not.
1:32.1	Kate Klonick is an assistant professor of law at St. John's University, and she was given
1:36.8	an unusual degree of access to the company during the creation of Facebook's oversight board.
1:42.6	And her reporting on this subject, a brilliant article
1:45.4	can be found at New Yorker.com. Kate, welcome. Thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be talking
1:50.6	to you. You've been working on this piece about Facebook for quite a while. How did you first get
1:55.8	interested in this question of how content is moderated, as they say, and how did you feel when the future of
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WNYC Studios and The New Yorker, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.