Facebook wants you to know that its decision about Donald Trump’s future was not really Facebook’s decision, but the Facebook Oversight Board’s decision. The Facebook Oversight Board wants you to know that Facebook’s decision is indeed Facebook’s decision after all.
Got that?
You would be forgiven if you had some questions here. For starters, what is this Oversight Board? The board isn’t Facebook, but it is by, for and of Facebook: a commission of outside experts in freedom of expression, misinformation and more, funded by a $130 million trust of the firm’s creation, to which consumers may appeal content moderation.
On Wednesday, this commission answered Facebook’s query of whether it should reinstate the former president on the platform . . . by refusing to answer. The company, proclaimed the panelists, was right to suspend the president after the riot at the U.S. Capitol. But now, it must decide for itself whether that suspension will stand.
The Oversight Board’s purpose was always to reduce Facebook’s power, yet skeptics have always asked whether it also reduces Facebook’s responsibility. This week, the body declined to do either.
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg hyped the Oversight Board concept a few years ago as a salve for concerns about a private company’s unaccountable control over the public conversation, though at the time he called it the “Supreme Court.” Now ask a constitutional theorist: What is a judiciary supposed to do? This particular body can decide whether Facebook’s rules were properly enforced. What it says goes regarding, say, an opposition group disciplined for criticizing a repressive regime. Or a white supremacist let off for spewing racist invective. Or a former president exiled for an undetermined period of time for inciting insurrection.
Yet the board can’t decide anything about the integrity of the laws themselves, or those mysterious algorithms that undergird the whole game; instead, it may only advise.
The Oversight Board claims it is punting only because Facebook itself punted. The commission has in essence adopted the favorite argument of its most strident naysayers: The outcome of this blockbuster case was all the same to Facebook, because there was money to be made and money to be lost on either side of it—and enemies, too. Better to blame it on someone else.
Say the board had confirmed Facebook’s decision in full. The company would have been able to use the board as cover for attacks from conservatives who accuse Zuckerberg of throwing down his lightning bolt from on high.
Same goes for if the board had told Facebook it was utterly wrong. Facebook would have been able to dodge liberals’ ire for going easy on a democracy-destroying con man. “We did do the right thing,” Facebook might protest, “but these other guys wouldn’t let us!” The Oversight Board in that event hardly would have enhanced this elusive “accountability” the company claims to quest after. Determined not to become merely a fig leaf for Face-book to obscure its sins, the commission opted instead to be a hair shirt.
Where does that leave us? Most helpfully, the Oversight Board has demanded that Facebook craft clearer standards and impose them in a clearer manner. Still, the fate of Trump is right back where it is always was: in Zuckerberg’s lap. That means that, while the board has returned to Facebook the responsibility it sought to shirk, it has returned along with it the power that chafes at critics the world over.
Or perhaps we should look at it another way. Facebook has been deprived of the greatest power of all: to choose not to choose.