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

“Is that there's no dissent? There is one decision, and then they've decided to fold kind of the idea of a dissent or a concurrence into these kind of notions of a minority of the panel, a paragraph. This is like the minority of the panel felt differently about the reasonings for this. So that would be one thing if it was, you know, just getting read from the bench and that's all you heard about it and you let the reasoning of the opinion or the decision stand on its own, but you didn't. You then had everyone kind of off tweeting all of their thoughts about like everything and talking and doing and I think that that's one of the things that I even asked one of the people who came on my show that day, I was like, what's going on? Like if this is a court, like you wouldn't be doing a TV hit like to talk about like what you the conversation was like in chambers that would be like totally verboten so it is kind of like well are you a court because this sounds a lot like a court but now you're not”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No one knows. That's a great question. All day yesterday, I was kind of a little shocked, all of the different types of thoughts and collective pronouns that were being used when people were talking. One of the main reasons to have anonymity on a panel like this is that anonymity gives you a certain amount of intellectual privacy. You know, the idea that you're not going to be publicly shamed for being in the minority is pretty key. The other thing is that these people that are on the board are all over the world. And a lot of the cases that they are touching on possibly pose really very real security risks to them, should their names be attached to kind of the outcomes. And so that was another consideration for when all of this was being discussed about whether they should be anonymous or not. What we didn't know is whether there were going to be dissents. And so what's super interesting here”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, yeah. I mean, but that's a pretty big range from one to nine. And then that's all fine. So it's pretty anonymous. And then the members of the oversight board are like out in the world. They're doing interviews with Axios. They're doing interviews at the Aspen Institute. They're publishing their own blog posts about this decision. I just can't quite understand what part of it is supposed to be anonymous and why and what part of this is really public.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One thing that strikes me about the Trump decision is that it is anonymous. There's frequent reference to the minority and how the minority would have judged things differently. We don't know who's in the minority. We don't know how big the minority is.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Usually, so that's precisely what happens here. So the process around hearing cases of five person randomly selected anonymous panel here's the case. And then right now how they basically have this working because some of these things were not laid out in the bylaws and it's up to the board to decide them on its own is basically that they, right now the panel is writing up a draft of whatever it is that they determine is the right solution to the problem after they kind of arrange collect facts and ask people for more opinions and read all the briefs and everything else. And then they start circulating that and a majority of the full board has to approve the final decision. And that was basically exactly how it worked for the Trump case.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, for the Trump decision, did all of them hear it in vote, or was it a small group? I mean, normal courts, you go to the appeals court, they have a lot of judges, but first three of them hear it, right?”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right now, the board is four co-chairs with a total of 20 members that all are basically hearing cases related to user appeals that come out of Facebook on content moderation or things that Facebook itself kicks to the board to reveal like the Trump suspension. So those kind of 20 individuals are, it's a pretty illustrious group of people. There's a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, former Prime Minister of Denmark, former editor-in-chief of the Guardian, former Circuit Court judge, a former Supreme Court clerk and Columbia Law Professor, not to mention a ton of other people that are just experts in human rights law and lawyers and freedom of expression in their own right. So it's a pretty well-staffed group that has a lot of experience both with institution building and freedom of expression and international human rights.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who's on the oversight board? We keep talking about it like it's a court. I don't know if that's correct. I want to get there, but they have some people who are making decisions and writing opinions and disagreeing. Who are those people?”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really, do hold Facebook accountable in some way, they are running the risk of having their funding cut off. But in the short term, six years feels like a long time, and this is what they were charged to do. So we're seeing what the board is doing. But this is basically how it works. All of the board members in the administration are basically employees of the LLC, which is it's self-controlled by the trustees. So that's kind of like, that's how this kind of breaks down from a business standpoint. And it's fairly elegant solution. The trust documents are pretty interesting to read if you're into that kind of thing, which I wasn't, but I had to do anyway. So I think there actually is for right now, for the next five to six years, I think there is a fair amount of financial independence. We'll see what happens four years down the road.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that problem was kind of interesting. So they decided to set up a Delaware Trust Corporation. They set up a Delaware Trust Corporation in October of 2019. Then the next day they arranged for that Trust Corporation to serve the oversight board LLC, which is a limited liability corporation. The entire purpose of the trustees and the entire purpose of the trust was to administer a $130 million irrevocable grant that Facebook gave and then sniffed the purse strings from to this trust. It's not an endowment. This is like an important distinction because they cannot actually, the trustees can't invest the money. There's no investment committee. It's specifically not allowed. It's not enough money to be able to endow it. It is enough money to probably have it run for five to six years. And then it is contemplated that there will be an endowment. So there is the question of like, well, if they really do go at Facebook.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Step back for one second. So, Facebook is a huge company, they operate a massive platform, several massive platforms around the world. Their content moderation decisions have an enormous impact on people, on culture, on democracy. They wander into speech issues at a global scale where a team of people in the United States cannot plausibly understand it. Speech issues in other countries that Facebook runs into at scale. Some of those things you brought up human rights law, some of those things directly lead to horrible outcomes like genocides, literally with Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg is kind of unaccountable to the shareholders of Facebook, the corporate structure. So it's a very unique company. He owns a majority of the voting shares. So he fundamentally cannot be removed as CEO. And so his solution is I'm going to set up a different thing to hold Facebook account.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To unpack just on how they did make decisions. And so I'm happy to kind of go over the basic framework of how they solve the problem of independence because I think one of the biggest things that we kind of don't know about the board is what it is and like what it is indebted to for Facebook and what makes it plausibly independent.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Work when you're talking about public rights of freedom of expression and international human rights law, which is where the conversation was and still is to some degree. And you're talking about a private corporation. How do you make something have teeth? How do you make it legitimate? How do you make it independent? All of these questions were very open and on the table. And so about six months after that kind of announcement from Zuckerberg, I started following inside Facebook, the government and strategic initiatives team, which was the team that had basically been tasked under Nick Clegg to come up with this solution to what exactly this board was going to be and how they were going to solve all of these institution building problems. And so I started following that and I ended up doing that for 18 months, watching as they wrote their documents and figured out what they were going to do. And there's a lot of stuff.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We still don't know exactly. I know it's like the worst answer ever to start out with, but I think it's the right one. We can talk about how it's been talked about, and I think that that's going to lead us to kind of what we saw yesterday and how what we can kind of make of this opinion. So in November 2018, Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was going to set up this, what had been kind of colloquially joked about and called like the Supreme Court of Facebook. This idea that they were going to start running certain types of content moderation decisions once they had finished being appealed internally at Facebook, they would make it possible to appeal to an outside independent oversight board. And the question was, how the hell do you set that up? You have a pretty fundamental principle agent problem right off the bat. And then how do you set that up? What does it make you do? And how do you kind of make this?”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're talking the day after the Facebook oversight board released a big decision about whether Facebook was correct to indefinitely ban Donald Trump from its platform. There's a lot of concepts in that sentence alone. Let's start with the Facebook oversight board itself. In February, you published a long piece of New Yorker called Inside the Making of Facebook's Supreme Court, which detailed the process by which Facebook conceived of having an oversight board, literally the meetings and the software they used to create this board, virtually during a pandemic. This decision feels like the first big moment for that board. What is the Facebook 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
“Note, you're going to hear me mention a Supreme Court case called Marbury v. Madison. That's the very famous case from early in this country's history where the Supreme Court basically gave itself the power to invalidate laws passed by Congress. Oh, and you might pick up that I sound nervous here and there. That is because I always, always get nervous talking to law professors. I feel like I'm back in my OneL days every time. So bear with me. Okay, Kate Clonic from St. John's University Law School. Here we go. Kate Clonic here, a law professor at St. John's University Law School. You are also one of the foremost chroniclers of Facebook's moderation efforts. Welcome to Decoder.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To help figure it all out, I ask Kate Klonik, a law professor at St. John's University Law School, to join the show. Kate has been researching and studying the oversight board from the start. She embedded with the board as it was forming to write a definitive piece for the New Yorker called Inside the Making of Facebook's Supreme Court. Kate and I talked about what the board is and isn't, what its powers are, and what this Trump decision means for the board's authority in the future. And we talked a lot about what it means for private companies to have things that look and feel like legal systems. If you step back, it is bonkers to think that any company needs to fund something that looks like a Supreme Court. But Facebook is that big in that globally powerful. So here we are.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Facebook platforms would stay in place. And the decision? Well, the decision was to kick it all back to Facebook. The board said Facebook didn't have an actual policy in place for it to review, and that Facebook should write one and send that back to the board in six months. In the meantime, Trump remains banned from the platform. So, what does that all mean? What is the Facebook oversight board? What are its powers? How is it even independent from Facebook itself? You've probably heard people call the board the Supreme Court of Facebook. Is that the right way to think about it? Will every platform require a moderation court like this in the future? Or is this just another way for Facebook to exert influence over the Internet? This is a big new experiment, and the Trump decision is a big moment for that experiment.”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Patel, editor in chief of the Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today we're focused on one of the most complicated problems of all, content moderation. If you're a decoder listener, you know that content moderation seems to come up in almost every episode. The question of how platform companies decide what to leave up and what to take down is messy, controversial, and extremely political. And if something on the internet is messy, controversial, and political, you know that Facebook will be at the bleeding edge of it. Last year, the company announced it would start sending difficult moderation problems to a new entity it calls the oversight board. That's a committee made up of lawyers, politicians, and speech experts that rules on whether specific content takedowns on Facebook are appropriate or not. That board just got its first big test last week as it issued a decision about whether former President Trump's indefinite ban”
2021-05-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Facebook’s Oversight Board has upheld the Trump ban. What’s next? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT