YouSaid · the spoken record

Kate Klonick

lines on the record: 69
first: 2021-05-11
most recent: 2021-05-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“To keep up content that had been flagged by other users into the jurisdiction of the board on appeal. So this means that if I find something that you said offensive and I flag it to Facebook as being lauding dangerous organizations or inciting violence and they say no, it's fine. We decided to leave it up. I can now appeal that decision. And I think that that's a huge deal because it puts the board into both the role of being watchers of the sensors and being now being the sensors themselves. Basically being like, no, that speech is too harmful. It has to come down. And I think that that's actually going to be a really weird thing for a lot of these people to do because I think a lot of these people are used to being like, no, that has to go back up for the sake of freedom of expression. I think it's going to be a lot harder to take down people.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that's been lost in all of the nonsense around Trump, and honestly, I know that people are like, the oversight board is a distraction. And I feel like Trump is a distraction. Trump is a distraction. I mean, for always and for all time, he has been a distraction from so much, but also from Modi and from Bolsonaro and all of the other leaders that are still in power that are threatening and still on Facebook, I think that this is just one moment. So I think the next thing that users can expect is that whatever happens coming out of this next six months is going to have a huge impact on other types of world leaders. The other thing I was going to say is that one of the things that's been lost in all of the emphasis on the Trump suspension is that in the last couple of weeks, Facebook actually had implemented something that they had promised to do for eventually, but we never knew how soon or when, which was to start putting their decision.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we're looking at this whole sweep of the oversight board being created, this big decision being referred to it, it asserting itself and saying, no, you actually have to make a policy, kicking it back to Facebook six months. They'll send it back to the oversight board. What should regular Facebook users be looking for next from this process?”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've heard that they're starting to. I heard that some other people who have heard this, so this is like getting deep into kind of hearsay and like just kind of rumor mill of inside inside Silicon Valley. But I think that they are definitely wanting to devolve product and policy more distinctly. I think that that's been happening for a while and I think the oversight board is a huge part of that. But I think that also that they are trying to get away from the idea that Jewel Kaplan is in charge of so much and doing so much and trying to put more onto Nick Clegg. And I think that like the New York Times article that came out today is like kind of part of that. I think that there is a desire to kind of set Nick up more for being a policy head. I think that's maybe it's too little too late, but I have no idea.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Inside of Facebook, one thing that we've heard a lot about is the content moderation shop is connected to their political operation shop. The lobbyists of Facebook are the people who write the rules for speech on Facebook. And that is deeply problematic. It's like gestured at in this opinion, but they've now kicked it back to that same shop, which is just faced any number of controversies over the years. Is that something just like Facebook needs to change to make all of this more credible?”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things and we still talk about it like there is this. You talk about the algorithm, both either from like data that we're getting people are generating from even being on the site and where their eyeballs are going to people making the content moderation decisions. I think that probably the algorithm is less sophisticated than we think.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I think that they should be very excited about this. And in fact, one of the most interesting series of calls I got yesterday or a text that I got yesterday from people that were inside the company, inside Facebook, were from people at the, as I would call it, in the factory floor or in the policy shop that were very happy because they had agitated for these types of changes for a long time and felt like this gave them the clout and authority that they needed to put forward this like rigorous new agenda and not have like a series of trying to rework the same terrible ad hoc rules. And so I think that that's going to filter down to content moderators and their job being easier. I will say that like I think that it continues to be something that we need to talk about and the fact that we are outsourcing this labor in this way and that we are like we're using individuals to cleanse”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Never mind Mentioned the error rate of moderation decisions. Connect this spectrum for me. We've done a lot of coverage of individual moderators at Facebook and their working conditions and how they feel and the fact that they have fundamentally bad jobs and often get PTSD afterwards. How should a contractor working in a Facebook moderation shop feel about the oversight board? What is the relationship that they should have and what is the relationship they have now?”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Error rate on content moderation decisions. Like, I just like that's not nuts. Like, can we just work on getting that lower for a while? Like, never mind keeping, like, Trump down. Like, that's a lot of people that are censored at the end of the day. This is really about just establishing some procedures. The substantive decisions, you're right. Everyone's going to fight about them. No one's going to be happy about them. There's lots of laws people don't agree with now too, but they feel protected by the fact that there's transparency and accountability of how they're enforced. Well, kind of, depending on, you know, depending on plenty of other systemic things. But that's kind of something that I think that we can get into once we have this baseline.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, like, to your point, like, pretty much the US courts have passed the buck on this all the time. I mean, this is the same. They don't make decisions on substantive nature viewpoint discrimination. They just say there can or cannot be viewpoint discrimination. And this is how we're going to determine this. I think that what you're going to see is that Facebook's going to still get to substantively decide what its policies are, but they're just going to have to be fair and consistent and proportionate in how they enforce them. And right now, that is the biggest hurdle that people who have worked around content moderation are the most upset about or is not that like Trump comes up or comes down when he incites violence or like laws and dangerous org. It's that there's a different rule for you. And for me and for Trump and for Alex Jones and that we don't know what any of those decisions are, any of those rules are people are constantly having unfair outcomes. I think it was like a 80.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's interesting about that is we keep coming back to laws and courts, which are fundamentally governmental functions and powers. There's, at least in this country, there's just not a way to have a speech court like that. So these all have to be corporate powers and enforcement mechanisms, at least here in America in 2021.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To go to a place that is so much more useful and rigorous than how we've been having this conversation for the last ten, fifteen years, which is that we are, it is time to stop letting people make these like, oh, he's a public figure. Oh, he's a political figure. Oh, he's newsworthy, like types of arguments and stop there. It's time to get to the next level and dig deeper and figure out what it is we value and mean by that. And to your point about all this stuff about like TikTok being racist, Twitter making arbitrary decisions, all of the stuff. Those have grounded intuitive roots in procedural justice and the rule of law that we can start to tie some of these things back to. And if we could start to have procedures around some of this stuff, then once we apply the substantive rules, they won't seem so arbitrary and capricious. And these companies won't seem so unaccountable.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Facebook's global user base is 7% in the US. Mostly it's everywhere else. This isn't even other people's standards. Facebook talks about itself as a community. It's not a community. It is like a couple billion communities all overlapping on top of each other that have almost like nothing in like they have nothing that necessarily binds them together. A community is defined by a group of individuals that have a shared sense of norms and values and responsibilities. And there's no global community that can even agree on whether we should allow female breasts online, let alone whether or not to allow when a Mexican cartel has like a beheading, whether or not to like let someone put that on a platform or whether it's too violent or its gore or whether we should do something in between. This is one of the other things that I'm excited about this decision is because I think it starts.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I understand the impulse. I'm going to be really mean about people for a second. Let's do it. I understand the impulse to stop, to turn off your brain and take the easiest possible solution that gives you absolutely meaningless results and won't have any type of procedural fairness over time. Sure. Like that seems great. Like we did that with newsworthiness. Newsworthiness is a circularly defined concept that people rely on all the time and actually means nothing. And it's time we finally started talking about that. And just because Supreme Court uses the language and circularly defines it still doesn't mean that it's not a problem philosophically to rely on that for a standard to police people's speech on. I really do understand the notion that people want there to be some answer out there that is going to solve this problem. But here's the thing. You just were talking about this.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I under I'm like very sympathetic to where that comes from, right? That you're gonna go seek out some other authority that has this like spiritual place in American life and then you have everyone has to just do that. Okay, like I understand the impulse, but I can't, I don't know how to square it with these are different companies with different roles, different algorithms. And yeah, if Twitter wants to be a little looser with its nudity standards than Facebook, that is actually a good thing for speech in America.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mostly agree with you that it would be bad to have one weird public quasi-private entity controlling all speech in America. It just seems bad on its face. On the flip side, there's just an enormous amount of instability in people's expectations of what they can do on services. The First Amendment kind of means that it's a free-for-all, which is good. The government can't make speech regulations. But the idea that Twitter will take something down and Facebook won't, and YouTube will demonetize a creator for doing pranks that are too dangerous, and TikTok, like people accuse TikTok, like literally the algorithm of TikTok of being racist all the time. I hear from the audience all the time that I don't know what's going to happen, right? Like where are the rules these platforms have to abide by from a baseline? And I think that's how you get to, you know, this very popular sort of political posturing that we should just impose.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That were all the same industry standard and that you couldn't have nudity on one platform and no nudity on another platform or something like that if that's what you decided. I think the differentiation is key to preserving freedom of expression. But I think that you're exactly right. That's one of the things that was specifically contemplated by Zuckerberg when he started to create these documents.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That, like, I think that they don't want to be associated with it by name. And I don't think that they want to have power over all of the different platforms. And so this is something I read about in the Yale Journal article that I went into, which is the different ways that this could play out. And one of the ways is that basically the trust corporation that I mentioned before that Twitter dumps $130 million into that and forms their own oversight board, right? To apply Twitter's terms of service and Twitter's community standards to whatever it is that Twitter wants to set those at, right? Or Twitter makes its own, which is just as easy, I think, Twitter makes its own trust and its own oversight board and endows that and does their own thing. And finally, the last thing is like, I think it would be terrible for freedom of expression globally if we started to have one set of merge standards that came together.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's no reason that they can't use their public pressure and authority and sway, which is really all that they it is, is like to start asking these hard questions. And this was always, I think that this is pretty soon to do it, but I think”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Completely. I also got that out of the opinion. I also got that. I was in the House of Lords testifying about the oversight board with Alan Resperger, who's on the board, former editor-in-chief of the Guardian. He basically said that in his House of Lords testimony was that they were coming after the algorithm. And I was like, that's interesting. That's, that wasn't in the charter. And so it was kind of foreshadowed, but I saw that in the opinion as well. And I think that it's really interesting. And I think that it is absolutely the right question because, as Jack Balkin says, is the crown jewels of how all of this works and what the real power source of Facebook is. I know for a fact because I've read the founding document so many times that it is not contemplated at all that they'll have any type of visibility into that. But I've always argued that like that doesn't mean anything. Just for the same reasons you're talking about it not being legal.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that strikes me as you kind of describe that process is the United States Supreme Court likes to say that it makes very narrow decisions, but it actually has sweeping authority over American public life, right? Should our schools be segregated or not? The Supreme Court said not. And they kind of make these decisions that have sweeping impact over our lives. And they actually kind of restructure society. The board's power here is limited to, well, you took something down, but you should put it back up. And it seemed like in this decision they want the additional power to say, how does your algorithm work? What do you see your algorithm promoting or disincentivizing or otherwise modifying in the conversation it has on Facebook? And how does your business model plug into that algorithm and have you make decisions about it? And they just don't have that power. And it seems like they really want it.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that the interesting thing here is that it ends up being a real question of legal realism and public pressure and reputation for the company. How bad it was going to look if they spent $130 million in two years and 20 brilliant people's time to do this and then they don't pay any attention to it.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“See, like, I love this. This is like people, my students are being like, is this legal? Can this can they do this? Like, and I'm like, anything is like legal or not legal until someone tells you not to do it. Can they do this? Like, well, they just did. And like, I don't know what we do to stop them. I mean, what we do to stop them is the board tells them they can and the board did that as much as they could and they made it public and it's not been well received that they didn't answer those questions and I think that there is probably definitely a number of people at Facebook right now that are panicked over how to kind of move forward with more requests from the board in the future. But if you think about it from the perspective of if a government was called before a court to answer questions and the government said I'm really sorry court we can't tell you they just wouldn't fly you'd be in contempt of court like that's like the end of that”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the board submits a bunch of questions to Facebook as part of its Trump decision-making process. Facebook just says we're not going to answer seven of your questions. Is Facebook allowed to just not answer the board's questions?”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With platforms. I have no idea. I think about this all the time, but I think that police for now looks like the Oversay Board is pretty serious. It really could have been people taking their checks and rubber stamping Facebook's decisions, and it could have been nothing. But a 40-page decision that cites to international human rights law and outs Facebook for not answering questions that were posed to it after it created this board to begin with, I think that this is a pretty serious. Well, right now, it looks like a pretty serious group and decision.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way that they thought, or at least it isn't so far. I mean, there's a couple of things that can happen out of this. The oversight board could be a total distraction. We never get anywhere with it. It gets disbanded in five years or whatever. But at least it was a pretty noble experiment and gave us kind of a new valence or way of thinking about how to solve some of these problems. The other thing is that it could take hold in the idea of people being entitled to boards like this or being able to avail themselves of boards like this becomes something that is either mandated and regulated by governments right now Canada is contemplating mandating the creation of oversight boards within their country for these speech platforms or it's something that the public simply demands of these speech platforms and they have to kind of put them in place themselves and Twitter gets forced into it because it becomes kind of the next wave of kind of how we deal.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“States briefly, if they kind of really wanted to, but that's about it. And so I think that this is like, you kind of have to galaxy brain yourself a little bit and make yourself go to a new place of like, what is the world going to look like if entities like this exist and they're governing public rights and we need to kind of figure out a way to democratize or hold accountable private companies governing public rights, especially when those public rights like freedom of expression are rights that you have traditionally accepted from government control because governments are traditionally bad at telling us what to do with our speech and dangerous when they tell us what to do with their speech. So it's like hard to make government the solution to this either. And so I think that Facebook chose a governance path with like the oversight board. And I think that they hoped that they would be shoving off these substantive decisions, what we saw yesterday was that that didn't work out quite well.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is so much nicer than just like sitting in my apartment staring at my dog, being like, why won't you tell me what to do about the Facebook oversight board? So, I think that that's completely correct. So, the way that I think about this is that Facebook has basically chosen a path of governance. They are in, and so is Twitter, in an intractable kind of situation in which they are forced to make these terrible content moderation decisions that govern and have a huge public ramifications and that compromise human rights like freedom of expression and safety. And at the same time, they're privately held companies and that they are privately held companies that operate transnationally and in the exchange of information. And so they are basically, they are a pretty big deal. They're pretty much outside in strength and power, outside the ability of any one country to shut them down everywhere. Not even the United States could shut down Facebook or Twitter everywhere. They could shut it down in the United States.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's just a part of this where Facebook gets to pretend it's the most important thing in the world all the time and it's created this board and here we are talking about it as though it's a Supreme Court and sort of right next door is Twitter and they're like yeah we're just banning the guy he's gone like we're not telling you if he's ever coming back maybe he'll never come back like you're just never gonna know and there's no process by which Trump or any of his team can appeal that decision Because Twitter is a private company, it's their platform, they can do what they want Facebook is trying to create this other thing I just can't tell if that is correct or whether it's fundamentally distracting or whether everyone should have a giant oversight board.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even if you're the president of the United States, or they might say that you were allowed to have different classes of type of things, but you have to be consistent about what classes people are in. And you have to like tell us what it means to be put into this class. I mean, so like one of the things that I wrote about with some of my research is at some point they used to define public figures by the number of like Google hits you had or like the number of times you showed up in Google News and like they would use Google to determine whether or not someone was a public figure or a combination of that and how many people followed you on the platform. But these are standards that are they changed all the time. I have no idea where that standard is now because we've had no transparency into how it changed or like where it's gotten to. And so I don't know. It's just I am excited for this conversation to have gotten to such a sophisticated place finally after the last 10 years of nonsense. And I'm really looking forward to it.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That special list that Trump was on, we don't know how big it is, right? But Trump, his relationship to Facebook and to Twitter, he's always sort of gotten his own space, right? And it's always been nuclear to moderate Trump in any way, shape, or form until it crossed the threshold of January 6th. Is this decision from the board saying you can't have those kinds of soft exceptions anymore? You have to treat everybody the same? Or is it if you're going to have exceptions, you have to be clear about them?”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was always going to be a group of people in Silicon Valley. And that was bullshit. And then a group of people that ended up being the winners that just wanted to use it as a way to just kind of like ad hoc make determinations on a case-by-case basis. I love that it's coming up and that this is something that the board raised because I think it's just absolutely fascinating.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sullivan, which kind of like was supposed to be a little play on New York Times U Sullivan, which established the public figure and newsworthiness kind of considerations in First Amendment law. And it toyed with this idea of like, well, how are they defined? How are they possibly defining newsworthiness and public figures? And I talked to a number of former policy people that had left the company in 2013 specifically around this newsworthiness question because they thought that this was an intractable standard that could never be consistently applied and was always going to be a question of newsworthy to who.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not a surprise because I don't think that they're lying. I think that they didn't technically apply their newsworthy exception to Trump. Trump is instead on a special list of newsworthy people. It's a different standard. And so they didn't lie. They're just like kind of they have different rules for different types of people for people that are high profile, people who have certain numbers of followers. We've known this for a long time. We've never had access to this list. We don't know how it's administered. We don't know like what goes into deciding content that those individuals say necessarily. And so this is like this is one of the best parts of this is kind of you have to tell us how this all works because this doesn't make sense to us. And it seems like you made it up as you went along. And so this isn't a standard at all. And so we can't even review it. I think that this is great because, I mean, I've written, they wrote a paper in 2018 called Facebook vis- ⁇-vis.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back with Kate One of the things that really came up in this decision a lot was the board asked Facebook, have you ever applied this exception called the Newsworthiness exception to Trump, where he's doing something that breaks your rules, but because he's the president and he's newsworthy, you're giving him a pass. And everyone assumed that Facebook, this was their justification, and Facebook said, no, we've never applied the newsworthiness exception, which A, I know you have some strong feelings about newsworthiness as a concept, but B, that is a big surprise.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, but I think that it's so messy, but this is almost an interesting question of administrative law, which is that they defer to the decision of the underlying body, right? And so they agreed that they made the right decision at the time to take him down. And that's not clear that enough time has passed that problem of imminence or dangerous organization affiliation or lauding dangerous organizations are passed. And so that was the other part was like, well, we can't make that decision. You have to do that. That part was the pontiest of all of it, I think. You were right. They could have basically reached some type of determination that was the opposite around the ban. And that part, they absolutely did kind of put it back on Facebook to do something one way or the other.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But this is where I think that the wishy washiness really gets me. Shouldn't they have said you got to unban him until you come up with a rule that would properly ban him as opposed to this just like reflexive reaction to something bad's happening and he's making it worse and we're going to turn him off?”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Decision they want Facebook to have said that that's what's at stake, and they don't want to have to say it for them and like maybe it's like punting the issue because they don't want to deal with it. But they're going to have to deal with it one way or the other that, you know, when this comes back.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that that's probably also right. So here's what I'll say about what the term proportionality means in an international human rights context, which is basically not sure that the idea of proportionality is that you have some type of ability to atone for your punishment, or you have some type of kind of proportionate response to whatever it is that the underlying problematic act that you've committed. And so it's not clear to me it is possible to have a permanent suspension of someone's freedom of expression on a platform or ability to be on a platform and have it ever be consistent with international human rights standards. A permanent suspension is basically de facto disproportionate. But I think that it's a good argument because I do think that maybe you're right, but they want that type of finality of that.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me push back on that. I find myself really wondering what the limit of authority for this oversight board is. And I think they punted specifically because they said you need to come up with a proportionate response to Trump's actions and come back to us in six months with that response based on any rule, which sounds like someone's got to reinstate Trump to Facebook and it's not going to be us. We're telling you that indefinite ban is not acceptable. There's no rule that says indefinite bans exist. But we're not going to tell you the term of indefinite ban. The temptation to say that the board claimed for itself a greater authority by not making a decision is like very high. I see a lot of lawyers making that comparison to Marbra versus Madison at the Supreme Court. Like there's this big historical parallel that seems very tempting. But here, just like narrowly it...”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You'd like us to basically make this somebody else's problem for you, but we're not going to do that, and we resent that you would even ask us. And I just thought it was a powerful, powerful response really rooted in the rule of law and procedure instead of getting sucked into the vortex of intractable online speech problems and the definition of newsworthiness and public figures and things like that is never going to get you anywhere.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you know what a gift it is to have a cogent, rigorous, well-researched record of everything that we know happened on the front end, but matching that with Facebook going on the record in the back end of what it was doing and how they were doing this? Like for the last 20, 15 years, like we've only had people leak stuff out of the companies to tell us this type of thing. There has been no process for this. I was like a breadth of fresh air to like have that to resource going forward. But that's kind of a trial court type of hat. And so then they kind of get into this appellate court type of hat and they're like, no, we're not a legislature for you. And our mandate is to see what your rules are and whether or not they're consistent with your values and international human rights standards. And if you don't have a rule, we can't do that. And we're not going to make one for you because that's not our job. And we know what you'd like us to do.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it punts almost not at all, actually. I think that that's been one of the worst takes that's come out of this. It's not punting the issue at all because the issue is coming back. What they're saying is we're not going to carry water for you, Facebook. How I think about it is this, that one of the conceptions of what, as we're talking about, what is this board? Is it a court? What is it? One of the questions is like, what type of level of court is it going to be? If it's a trial court, then it's a fact-finding body and it does all of this work and maybe it makes its statutory interpretations of rules. Or is it more like a Supreme Court or a court of appeals court, which is going to actually review the law and whether the law matched the facts of the thing? And what we see out of this decision is they are doing all three. I want to just hit on this really quickly. You talk about the fact that they kind of lay out the events of the sixth and the 7th of January and that those were really hectic, crazy times.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's actually a tone to me in this decision that's like, don't put this on us. You know, I think you could read that and come back to us in six months with a real decision, and we'll tell you what to do. And that reads to me is kind of asserting its authority in a way, but it's also really, really narrow and kind of punts the issue.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This leads kind of right into this decision. The simplest way of understanding this decision is the capital rights happened Trump posted a bunch of videos and posts that ostensibly encourage people to stop acting badly at the Capitol kind of supported it pretty messy actually in terms of just a straight interpretation of what Trump meant to have happen because of these videos and posts. Facebook takes them down. He tries again. They take him down and say you're indefinitely banned from Facebook. This is the 6th and the 7th of January, a very chaotic time in America. All the other platforms are doing the same thing. Facebook then says, well, we got this board. We're going to kick the indefinite ban of Trump to the board to see if that was the right decision. And the board comes back. And I would just, they say, fine, it's fine for you to have indefinitely banned him. We're not going to write a policy for you an indefinite bans. Also, you have no policy on indefinite bans. And they seem very unhappy with Facebook.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, but there is one other thing that they have obligated themselves to do, which is that when the oversight board makes public policy recommendations, Facebook has obligated itself to respond within 30 days to the oversight board's policy recommendations and whether they have been implemented or not, how they have been implemented, or if they weren't implemented, why not? And this is this form of like weak form review is something that Harvard law professor Mark Tish kind of puts it this way, that is like the court calling on basically the executive or the legislative body to kind of come back in and fix their problem and then report back as to like how they ended up doing that. And so that is actually also a pretty important reputational pressure that the board can put on Facebook.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It has to go back up, that has to go back up. But like if you would also posted a picture of my dog and it had gotten taken down, they have no obligation to restore your content. They have said that they will make efforts to restore similar content, but they've no promise. So that's it.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the power that the board has over Facebook is incredibly narrow, but it is a small devolution of power that I've always argued is actually a lot bigger than it seems. For right now, for content that is removed or kept up on Facebook, the board after a user has appealed it internally at Facebook, they can take that appeal and give it to the board. And if the board hears their case and makes a determination over turning Facebook's decision to keep down the content or put it back up and it's only content like single object content, it's not even pages, right? That was a special thing that the board considered for Trump. Users can't appeal their page takedowns right now. Facebook has agreed to adhere to whatever the board's decision is on that specific piece of content. So my specific piece of content, my picture of my dog that gets accidentally removed from Facebook and the oversight board says,”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think they're there with you. I think they're still deciding what they wanted to do. So, for example, I mean, just to kind of like put it right on the nose, they talked to me a number of the board members unconditioned of anonymity talk to me for the New York.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and even, I don't know, the Supreme Court doesn't say our big decision in this massive policy issue is coming out tomorrow at 9 a.m. Everybody get ready and then queue up its press hits. I keep coming back to that question, is it a court, right? I mean, we've all called it this Facebook Supreme Court. It seems right sort of conceptually. Facebook has difficult decisions to make. It doesn't seem to want to make them or be accountable for them. So it's going to kick them over to this other place. They will take the hit and Facebook will presumably do what they say. But if you're going to be that kind of institution, there's just like a part of it where that's not how courts actually act, but just conceptually, I can't tell if this is a court or not.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT