Oversight Board accepts case on Trump's indefinite suspension from Facebook | Hacker News Reader

Oversight Board accepts case on Trump's indefinite suspension from Facebook

oversightboard.com

95 pointstelotortium90 comments

I think “when they have started creating their own pseudo court system” is when we should start breaking these companies up. Yeesh.

The bizarre opaqueness/projected importance of this is extremely off putting.

Apparently it is independent ;)

That's because it is, that's the entire point of it.

But... isn't banning an ex president for life important? Who SHOULD decide? And how?

I would say that's an easy question. No, it's not important. Who should decide? Whoever at the company is given the authority to ban people from their website. How? Following whatever protocols they come up with? Want to have their own pseudo-court system? Go for it. Want to have a ban lottery so people may just randomly be banned for no reason? Go for it, it's your website do what you want with it.

This is a company that built itself under the premis that it was the public square and now it is arbitrating who can speak and who cannot? I'd say they've violated the original social contract, and that of the open source web, and are now subject to regulation – by entities they helped put in place in government.

This whole thing is becoming a dystopian nightmare.

Edit: Image if AT&T started shutting off Democrat's cell phones.

What does the “premise of a public square” mean?

What social contract did they enter into?

What legal obligation do they have to their users?

It's in their ToS. That's a contract, right?

What’s in their TOS? That they’re a public square? That access to the platform and expressive freedom of the users trumps facebook’s moderation rights?

I don’t think so.

I think the right term for what they're referring to is "privatization of the public square".

While I really dislike the fact that Facebook and Twitter have so much say in who gets a platform, the fact remains that they are private businesses that are not subject to any regulation on who they allow on their platforms.

Remember that government regulations can also be used by "the other side" when in power.

> This is a company that built itself under the premis that it was the public square and now it is arbitrating who can speak and who cannot?

'now'?

May I submit this news article from 12 years ago into evidence? :) https://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/dec/30/facebook-breas...

This idea of Facebook as some sort of haven for free speech seems to be a new invention; it's always been pretty censorious.

> Who SHOULD decide?

The only answer that can only be acceptable here — as flawed as it is — is a board originating from the UN

I don't think the UN has jurisdiction.

They didn’t have jurisdiction over air travel either, until they did.

Definitely not, the UN has no legitimacy here, let alone the judicial framework.

Ideally, there would be 'very simple and clear regulation' put forth by the government, and then it should be 'easy' for FB's 'independent panel' (doesn't need to be anyone special, but maybe some lawyers) to make the calls.

Then it can be taken up in the courts if need be.

We definitely need move this away from the control of the private sector of this there is no doubt.

And also, I'm very wary of lifetime bans for things which are crossing the threshold into the public commons i.e. FB/G etc..

I suggest there might be a better way to do this.

> Definitely not, the UN has no legitimacy here, let alone the judicial framework.

The UN has many, many specialised agencies with legitimacy, jurisdiction, and judicial frameworks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_specialized_agencies_o...

I think we’ll see one for media networks

They have no legitimacy in this case, and just because an agency exists, doesn't really give it legitimacy either.

The UN is a grab bag of patchwork things, some for the better, some for the worse.

This is the last thing we want the UN involved in.

If there were people truly suffering from this, then they'd be a great place to have an agency to give voice to the issue, but beyond that, no.

> They have no legitimacy in this case, and just because an agency exists, doesn't really give it legitimacy either.

What does legitimacy mean to you in this context? I don't disagree that mere existence doesn't grant it, but I'm not sure I understand what (or who) would, in your view.

Hacker news comments have this theme of demanding more human intervention, and also getting extremely upset at instances of human intervention.

Any review process that's at least somewhat fair will tend to resemble a court. A rule was violated, evidence on both sides, etc.

>Hacker news comments have this theme of demanding more human intervention, and also getting extremely upset at instances of human intervention.

Thats because it's not just one person sockpuppeting all these accounts. There's me, and then there's Alice. She's almost always wrong.

I don't think the people who want Facebook to be broken up are same people who complain about monopolies... perhaps you are referring to two different groups of commenters?

Whether or not a review process is doing its job is a separate argument from the point that it's regrettable that a review process is needed in the first place.

I view it as a failure of the current political climate that we need to turn to Facebook to fund an oversight board. A few months ago, Congress had a chance to cross examine the world's most influential CEOs about Section 230 to help them come up with meaningful legislation. Instead, they squandered the opportunity by complaining about decisions or content they found objectionable.

Despite all the talk, ultimately, the first amendment means congress has relatively little power over the content on social media websites.

My experience workin with lawyers enforcing content policies for social media sites based on laws, I uh, can’t quite agree with you.

Example: recommended not to go to trail to keep questions & answers about math homework problems on a site because there was a successful argument that it’s illegal to copy/distribute the answer key to a copyrighted math textbook, so having them collected in a category on a website at scale would create an easy target for many publishers to litigate on some subset of content, and the content would be at high risk of being considered illegal under DMCA. (A good argument for decentralization, but leaves big gap in curation which many people consider critical)

Fun part is that this hasn’t been tested (or hadn’t since I was doing that stuff) but the fact that lawyers direct these decisions based on experience and companies choose to pay or not pay based on that, your fantasy of some kind of unambiguous first amendment that the US government or legal system doesn’t regulate sounds hilariously uninformed.

Copyright is one broad exception to the first amendment, yes, but note it's only an exception because enforcing copyright is a power explicitly granted by the constitution.

Most acknowledged first amendment exceptions are relatively narrow, at least compared to the controversial parts of the facebook content policy.

They are narrow, but broadly applied when useful, or abused by holders.

What even is this? A board funded by Facebook is supposed to be some sort of neutral arbiter of what's allowed to be on their site?

"Independent"... but uses fbcdn and blocked by Firefox's Facebook container.

Have a look of the source code of the page. It literally starts with...

Who's running the website is not the interesting part of this, note how US government independent agencies still use government IT.

Because they're part of the US government. They're "independent" in the sense that they're not as closely tied to the head of the executive branch as e.g. cabinet departments, but they're still answerable to the judiciary at the very least.

This is a fairly strong argument that you've made, but I wonder if it was the one you intended to make.

Wtf is the oversight board? I am missing something where we went dystopian?

Actually it's a good first step.

Basically, FB is punting the responsibility of making the tough-call ban decisions to a 'neutral entity' - which is actually a very good idea.

Bad on the whole, because FB ultimately I don't think should be entirely responsible for the decision (we need some helpful regulation maybe?).

But nevertheless, it's a decent idea because it does add some legitimacy to the decisions.

Zuck would probably like nothing other than to wash his hands of the publicity of decisions making, that said, I'm doubtful of the neutrality of the board either politically or from FB itself.

The board - whoever they are - knows that Zuck is the Man, and that's that.

Facebook are funding an 'independent' oversight committee to tell them that their decision making was correct. I think it achieves a you things for them:

1. Suggests to regulators that regulation is not needed, as they have self imposed regulation. This way, it only needs to appear to work, rather than actually work.

2. Shifts the blame of the decision to an independent board, which can later be thrown under the bus if required.

I don't understand the cynical takes in the comments.

Something like this seems like the least worst option. We wouldn't want the government telling private companies how to moderate their websites, but we also wouldn't want Mark Zuckerberg making those decisions.

> We wouldn't want the government telling private companies how to moderate their websites

“We”, who?

Manifestly, plenty of people in this thread have explicitly argued that this should be either done by the government or go beyond the national government to the UN. So, while you might not want the government to do this, and I might not want the government to do this, plenty of people do want state or superstate direction rather than private freedom of speech/press here.

For me it just seems like another way to cover whatever they want to do.

Just like any of the FAANG companies when you "appeal" a decision and it just goes to the same people who make the same decision.

Who established the board and who pays their salaries

That’s literally the first entry in their FAQ. tldr - a trust set by Facebook.

Facebook announced an initial commitment of $130 million to launch its new Oversight Board, which is designed as a way for users to appeal the social giant’s content decisions, but the entity is behind schedule with initial board members to be announced in 2020.

The Oversight Board — which has been dubbed Facebook’s “Supreme Court” — will have the ability to make binding decisions independently of CEO Mark Zuckerberg or anyone else at Facebook. It’s set to launch in the first half of 2020, comprised of staff and board members independent of the company.

(https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/facebook-130-million-f...)

Not dystopian or absurd, at all. It's like a tobacco company sponsored research lab to determine if nicotine is addictive.

No, it's not. This isn't about addiction, that's a different conversation. This is about a private company trying to do a better job of moderating what are very nuanced and important situations: what is acceptable behaviour on their private platform ("in their home") and what is not acceptable behaviour.

The problem is Facebook is only going to ask for help if they don't care about the verdict.

If one of the possible answers is bad for business then what?

Users can appeal content moderation decisions to the board themselves: https://www.oversightboard.com/appeals-process/

The comment you’re replying to is not trying to make the discussion about addiction. They are pointing out the absurdity of expecting a corporation to self-regulate itself in any meaningful way.

This Oversight Board is likely nothing more than a manufactured authority figure designed to sway public opinion by deflecting responsibility away from Facebook in regards to censorship. Don’t be surprised when this Oversight Board comes out in full support of how Facebook handled the situation.

As long as there has been democracy corporations have had oversight over controlling mass communications. What is happening now is not new or different.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/time-private-us-media...

The classic quip to this end is something like: "freedom of the press is a freedom only available to people who own a press."

Almost always Facebook does not care about the outcome of content moderation decisions. It does not meaningly affect ad revenue, but it's a huge driver of bad press. They want to externalise it as much as possible.

I think in this case they would actually stand to gain if they could just say "whelp, you heard the board, unban his account. sorry folks, nothing we can do, our hands are tied"

"comprised of staff and board members independent of the company"

Independent in what sense?

Do we know for sure that they and their families don't own any Facebook stock and are not associated with Facebook employees/owners?

Just as important, how do they get on to be on Facebook's "Supreme Court"?

I presume they're not elected by Facebook users and don't actually represent them in any tangible sense, so whose interests do they represent?

It sort of reminds me of an HR panel - there to protect the company, not the user.

130 million?!

Why would such a thing cost so much?

This is the first I've heard of this new oversight board concept, who knows how this will go, but I think it's a really unique concept and let's give it a shot! If anything, it's just nice to see an innovative strategy applied to very big problem of today. I wish the best of luck to all of the members.

Creepy.

FB can and should ban whoever they want, for whatever reason. Just make it publicly clear why, along with all of the name of the people on this "oversight board". I probably shouldn't assume this board will be guided by the U.S. view of free speech.

> I probably shouldn't assume this board will be guided by the U.S. view of free speech.

The US view of free speech is that private firms (other than regulated common carriers, etc.) have it and don't have to use their platform to relay your speech unless they’ve made a contract with you to do so.

I would assume that The Oversight Board will be guided by this, plus whatever more specific guidelines FB has specified.

Well, if there was any legal fallout in lawsuits from the ban, some independent solidarity would sure help curtail that avenue. So from that aspect alone, prudent move.

[flagged]

Check your biases.

https://oversightboard.com/meet-the-board/

Given that one of the earliest comments on this post was:

> Wow, the company created, funded, and used exclusively by Facebook re-affirms Facebook's decision to do something?

> Truly shocking

i.e. someone blindly adding to the anti-tech dogpile without even bothering to click on the article and, you know, read it, I'd hold off on any diatribes about how SV is a monoculture. The anti-SV crowd seems to be afflicted by a similar rabid tribalism that makes nuanced discussion very difficult.

I'd love to see a short essay written by each board member about their general views of Trump, along with how their vote went.

I don't really see it happening, but it will be very weird in 2023 if Trump re-runs for election but is still banned from all the major social media sites.

It won't be weird. There's http://thedonald.win still online and is very active - and they ban/block any counter narratives, hypocritically "censoring"/blocking like what they're complaining about.

They were forced to move to https://patriots.win/ after losing control of the domain. I think they've built an interesting Reddit alternative with what appears to be a solid effort from a small team. I don't mind topic-based communities that specifically state their goal is to promote an idea or a particular theme and banning off-topic content. If they create a general Politics community and then proceed to do that, yes, that would be hypocritical.

Facebook and Twitter have always branded themselves as trying to connect the world. And now they (along with other big tech cos) have grown actively hostile to the half of the U.S. at least that considers themselves conservative. That's a big issue.

Is there any concrete metric by which you'd say Facebook is hostile to the conservative half of the US? The top-performing links on Facebook are consistently conservative, as are many of the members of this Oversight Board.

Are they allowed to post whatever they want on Facebook?

I regularly see people from across the political spectrum insist that Facebook censors their speech while allowing their political opponents to say anything. They can't all be right, although they could all be wrong. So I'm not sure any sort of subjective account is really going to help me figure out the difference.

I think we need to start requiring people to be more specific: what speech of theirs is being deleted/moderated - is it lies, hate, violence? They should show exactly what's being deleted/moderated, show us and then we can have conversation with depth to it.

That isn't specifically targeting conservatives though - causation vs. correlation.

Lol, the President of the United States was banned? What metric do you need?

I need a metric a lot better than "lol", because I know lots of people who think it's obvious that Facebook is biased in favor of conservatives. (If it weren't, they say, the president would have been banned sooner.)

If anything, the fact that he _wasn't_ banned until recently despite indulging in behaviour that would get any normal person banned could be read as evidence to the contrary (though I don't think it _should_ be; both Twitter and Facebook have an IMO misguided policy that national leaders should be handled with kid gloves and allowed do pretty much anything).

Just a note that they recently moved to patriots.win, as the owner of their original domain split with them. I haven’t had much time to study their moderation/censoring practices yet, but have been visiting occasionally out of curiosity.

I would argue that if their board is not ideologically and geographically diverse that there can be nothing even close to resembling neutrality. That being said, I think moderating for anything other than abusive or illegal statements on a platform as large as Facebook is a Sisyphean task.

You can look at their board on their site - it is people from all over the world, with a variety of professions.

Yeah, how many blue collar auto mechanics do they have on the board? Sailors, construction workers, firefighters, etc? How many ex-patriates of communist countries do they have on the board? How many moms with no college degree are on the board? How many Vietnam vets are on the board?

It's a stacked list of academics. Academia is a subculture in and of itself that is not in any way reflective of the world at large.

Moderating any content on a platform as large as Facebook is going to by Sisyphean.

'Abusive' requires definition to be worth discussing. I consider lies abusive in the context of politics, for instance.

I was curious about the board and spent an hour or so viewing the Twitter pages of each (most had one). Many had expressed sentiments critical of Trump in the past week or so. Some in a way that reflects directly on the issue at hand. Not a clear indicator of how they will judge this case, but interesting nonetheless.

From what I’ve read of their procedures they will publish some reasoning for their ruling as well as dissents, but unlike the US Supreme Court these will not be publicly attributed to the member writing them. Understandable for their own safety I suppose.

Facebook is a private company and free to do this however they want, so I’m not trying to be overly critical here— just found it interesting to learn a little about this private version of a court.

I don't see how this is significant given this program was created to give Facebook political cover and is entirely funded and controlled by Facebook.

It's about as independent as Facebook's ad and security divisions (that is to say not at all independent, the ad team has free reign to 2FA data for ad purposes, for example).

Facebook and its mock "independent" board cannot be trusted.

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