Donald Trump To Remain Banned from Facebook
In a move sure to play right into the “Big Tech” debate, former President Donald Trump will remain blocked from Facebook, the world’s largest social media site.
Facebook’s Oversight Board on Wednesday upheld the social network’s decision to ban former president Trump four months after the Capitol riot, but also faulted the social network for making a decision without clear criteria.
Facebook banned Trump indefinitely following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, citing posts that it said encouraged violence.
In its decision, the board agreed that Trump’s comments on the day of the insurrection “created an environment where a serious risk of violence was possible.” They pointed to calling the mob members “patriots,” “special,” and telling them to “remember this day forever.”
However, the expert panel also took issue with Facebook’s “indefinite” suspension of Trump, calling it “vague and uncertain.” It sent the decision back to Facebook and said it had six months to clarify Trump’s punishment and come up with a response that fits its known rules. It found Facebook didn’t use standard procedure in making its decision, and that the company had no published criteria for suspending a user indefinitely. The typical response for posting comments inciting violence is to remove the comment.
“The Board has upheld Facebook’s decision on January 7, 2021, to restrict then-President Donald Trump’s access to posting content on his Facebook page and Instagram account,” the board wrote. “However, it was not appropriate for Facebook to impose an ‘indefinite’ suspension. It is not permissible for Facebook to keep a user off the platform for an undefined period, with no criteria for when or whether the account will be restored.”
A letter was submitted to the board on Trump’s behalf, asking the board to reconsider the suspension. In a defense of the posts that got Trump removed from the site, the letter said it was “inconceivable that either of those two posts can be viewed as a threat to public safety, or an incitement to violence.” It also claimed all “genuine” Trump supporters at the capital that day were law-abiding, and that “outside forces” were involved.
The binding ruling by the 20-member Oversight Board, which is largely independent and funded by the social network, could set the stage for a new political era online, reshaping the way speech by public officials and other powerful people is moderated by social media companies.
Facebook’s Oversight Board decides who stays and goes. Here’s what you should know.
The board will decide if former president Donald Trump is allowed on Facebook, a test case of social media companies’ power to moderate inflammatory speech. (Jonathan Baran/The Washington Post)
“We will now consider the board’s decision and determine an action that is clear and proportionate,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs and communication said in a blog post Wednesday. “In the meantime, Mr. Trump’s accounts remain suspended.”Critics have argued that Facebook should have banned Trump at different points throughout his presidency, saying that his inflammatory language and frequent promotion of misinformation — about the coronavirus in particular — constituted an abuse of his office and of Facebook’s own community standards. But chief executive Mark Zuckerberg felt strongly that politicians should be given wide latitude because their speech was in the public interest.
The last straw came on Jan. 6, when Trump’s comments on Twitter appeared to encourage the Capitol insurrection, Zuckerberg said, and the company said it would suspend him indefinitely.
Facebook referred its decision about Trump to the Oversight Board shortly afterward. The board, which is less than a year old and had yet to decide a case at the time, was first conceived by Zuckerberg as a way to outsource the thorniest content moderation decisions without having the government intervene.
Seems to me the review board is forcing Facebook to decide whether it wants to foster unfettered speech, damn the torpedo’s, or whether its going to be a responsible corporate citizen.Report
It doesn’t have to even do that much. It just has to announce that it’s done one of those.Report
Except Zuckerberg is clearly wanting to do both because that’s the most profitable approach for him. His own Board is not going to let weasel.Report
Sisyphus exhausted but forever pushing the rock up the hill, Tantalus starving with food just out of reach, Trump full of unexpressed malice but unable to tweet.Report
Bravo.Report
I’m probably not the only person who doesn’t have a Facebook account. The appropriate regulatory scheme for social media platforms — and, of course, there has to be one — would, nevertheless, be an interesting topic for discussion. But Facebook’s individual decisions under the current regulatory regime, well, I like gossip as much as the next person — as long as the gossipers treat it like the gossip it is.Report
When I was on the Editorial Board here, both before and during my time as EIC, I participated in decisions about what to do with undesirable content, in particular comments that were perceived as detrimental to the overall site culture. It was extraordinarily difficult. The current board surely wrestles with the same kinds of problems and the same kinds of competing pressures — balancing the desire for a good atmosphere in the community with the desire for a robust, open forum for many different ideas. In the end, I concluded for myself that there is no rule you can devise which realizes both goals. You can have completely free and uncensored speech, or not — and in reality, no one really wants completely free and uncensored speech. (If you do, you need to got to 8chan and wade through conspiracy theories, pornographically intricate screeds of racial slurs longer in column-inches than the sixteen-point-font reprint of Atlas Shrugged, and advertisements for trafficked sex slaves. Say whatever you want there, but that sort of thing was too much even for Parler.)
There are differences of opinion on what kinds of comments poison a community’s atmosphere and what kind of a community is really wanted, but no matter what rule you try to make, someone will find a way to push right up to the edge of the rule without breaking it and say exactly the sort of thing that you don’t want said. Someone who wants to piss in the swimming pool will not only drink lots of beer first, they will then try hard to find a place you can’t effectively shoo them out of, and then take aim before letting go. And if you do shoo them away they’ll say it’s because you only want people who wear a certain color of swimming trunks, and pretend like they haven’t the slightest clue why you ever got the idea that they were doing anything wrong.
At some point you have to make a judgement call, and if you’re not the government nor doing so at the government’s behest, you have the ability to do so arbitrarily if need be. Facebook is entirely within its rights to say, and frankly I think it would be just fine for them to say, “Did we ban Donald Trump arbitrarily? No, but if you insist on claiming that we did, so be it. We’re not letting him come back.”Report