The Supreme Court of 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

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Facebook is at the center of the hottest controversies over freedom of speech, and its opaque, unaccountable decisions have angered people across the political spectrum. Mark Zuckerberg’s answer to this mess is to outsource: Facebook recently created and endowed a permanent body it calls the Oversight Board—like a Supreme Court whose decisions will be binding for the company. And Facebook immediately referred to the board a crucial question: whether to reinstate Donald Trump on the platform, after he was banned for inciting the January 6th riot at the Capitol. In this collaboration between the New Yorker Radio Hour and Radiolab, the producer Simon Adler explores the creation of the Oversight Board with Kate Klonick, whose reporting appears in The New Yorker. What they learn calls into question whether Zuckerberg’s fundamentally American-style view of free speech can be exported around the world without resulting in sometimes dire consequences.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:11.5	Hey, Jed, how you doing?
0:12.9	I'm doing well.
0:13.6	How are you?
0:14.3	Thanks for doing this.
0:15.5	It is very cool to be here in the host chair next to you, David.
0:18.6	Should we just do it?
0:19.6	Sure.
0:20.1	Let's go.
0:21.2	Okay, three, two, one. I'm, should we just do it? Sure, let's go. Okay,
0:27.0	three, two, one. I'm Chad Abumrad. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. And I'm David Remnick.
0:33.3	Chad, of course, is the host of Radio Lab, and he's joining me because today's episode is something special.
0:38.2	So Radio Lab has been reporting about Facebook for a couple of years now.
0:45.1	We've been looking specifically at the rules around what you can post on Facebook and what you can't and how Facebook decides.
0:50.2	With that hugely bureaucratic name, wait for it, content moderation.
1:07.4	Right, which essentially refers to 15,000-ish content moderators working 24-7, moderating all of the posts coming in from all the different countries around the world, moment by moment, according ideally to one set of rules, which in reality results in a giant mess.
1:13.2	A huge mess, but in real life, hugely important, with big global implications.
1:18.4	Think about Donald Trump, if you have to. Facebook kept bending the rules and allowing posts that would be banned because he was a president after all. He was special, but Trump
1:23.6	was finally banned by Facebook after he used the platform to incite the riot on January 6th at the Capitol.
1:31.1	Now, Republicans tend to see the Facebook ban as some enormous liberal plot to silence Trump.
1:36.7	And others say that the Facebook move was way too little and far too late.
1:42.0	And so with pressure coming in from both sides, what does Facebook now do with
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