If you're a very specific type of person, you might have spent Wednesday morning waiting anxiously to find out whether former President Trump would be allowed back on Facebook.

If you work in tech or news or politics or you spend a lot of time on Facebook, you were probably doing what I was doing, repeatedly refreshing Twitter,

waiting for the headline and wondering whether Facebook's independent oversight board would say

the company was right to kick Trump off indefinitely back in January after the Capitol riots.

On Wednesday, all eyes will be watching as the board makes a decision that will send

ripples through the Republican Party, Washington, D.C., and across the world.

To be honest, that's kind of what I expected Kate Klonick was doing, waiting to see whether this board, which is kind of like a Supreme Court for the company, would agree with Facebook or not.

Before Wednesday, they had said the company was wrong to take something

down, four out of five times. And this decision about Trump was their biggest one yet.

What were you doing when you were waiting for the oversight board's decision? Were you, like,

breathlessly refreshing online to see what they were going to say? No, I was teaching class, actually.

Like, I had the horrible timing of coming out directly coinciding with an internet law class

that I am teaching right now for Cornell law.

This class was at Cornell, but most of the time, Kate is a law professor at St. John's

University.

And she, more than almost anyone outside Facebook or the Oversight Board itself, has spent the past few years thinking and writing about how to make something like the Oversight Board work.

I was in class, and my students put the link to it in the chat for me.

It was very cute.

The board said, yes, okay, Facebook did the right thing in suspending Trump.

But an indefinite suspension was not appropriate.

And they said Facebook needed to figure out its policies fast.

To a lot of people, it sounded like the bored punting.

...