Trump and the Facebook Oversight Board

The Facebook Oversight Board—a recently-developed court of sorts that independently reviews Facebook’s decisions and policies—issued a major ruling this week, upholding the company’s initial decision to ban President Trump indefinitely, but calling on the company to come to a final decision on its suspension of Trump and similar cases with greater detail. The board also requested that Facebook clarify its policies on political leaders, do some additional fact-finding, and report back with more on its decision and rationale in six months—when the board will reconsider the ban. Host Jeffrey Rosen considered the impact of the decision for the future of digital speech with two experts who have done path-breaking work on the Facebook Oversight Board: Kate Klonick, assistant professor of law at St. John’s Law School who spent a year embedded with the Oversight Board as it was being developed, and Nate Persily, Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and co-director of the Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet.

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