The Supreme Court of Facebook
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 15 February 2021
⏱️ 40 minutes
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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.
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| 0:47.9 | I'm Dorothy Wickendon on today's Politics and More podcast, New Yorker contributor Kate Klonick and Radio Lab's Simon Adler, |
| 0:57.1 | look at Facebook's oversight board. The panel, sometimes called the Supreme Court of Facebook, |
| 1:03.6 | was assembled to deal with the company's most complicated content moderation questions. |
| 1:29.9 | Hey, Jet, how you doing? I'm doing well. How are you? Thanks for doing this. It is very cool to be here in the host chair next to you, David. Do we, should we just do it? Sure. Let's go. Okay, three, two, one. I'm Chad Abumrod. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. And I'm David Remnick. Inick. Jad, of course, is the host of Radio Lab, and he's joining me because today's episode is something special. So Radio Lab has been |
| 1:36.8 | reporting about Facebook for a couple of years now. We've been looking specifically at the rules |
| 1:41.5 | around what you can post on Facebook and what you can't and how Facebook decides. |
| 1:46.0 | With that hugely bureaucratic name, wait for it, content moderation. |
| 1:51.0 | 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, |
| 2:01.3 | moment by moment, according ideally to one set of rules, which in reality results in a giant mess. |
| 2:08.6 | A huge mess, but in real life, hugely important, with big global implications. |
| 2:14.3 | Think about Donald Trump, if you have to. |
| 2:17.4 | Facebook kept bending the rules and allowing |
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