Facebook’s responses in the Trump case are better than a kick in the teeth, but not much
One of the many ways that the Facebook Oversight Board (FOB) is different from many courts of law, let alone the Supreme Court, is that except on the narrowest of issues (the fate of the individual piece of content or account in a case) it doesn’t have the last word. The bulk and most consequential parts of the FOB’s decisions are non-binding policy recommendations; Facebook need not abide by them but does have an obligation to respond to them within 30 days. Despite often getting far less attention than the release of the decisions themselves, these responses are the most important part of the whole FOB experiment. It’s Facebook’s responses that make clear whether it’s engaging in the FOB process in good faith or whether the FOB is just Facebook’s very expensive agony aunt whose advice it only follows when it feels like it.
Today was the 30-day deadline for Facebook’s responses to the policy recommendations in the FOB’s decision on the suspension of Trump’s account. When the decision came out, much of the attention was focused on the fact that the FOB kicked the ball back to Facebook to decide what to do with Trump’s account. The FOB gave Facebook six months to work it out. Today, Facebook bit the bullet early: it suspended Trump’s account for 2 years. Much of the public attention on Facebook’s responses today has focused on this.
But this post is not about the politics of the decision to suspend Trump’s account for 2 years. There will be more than enough commentary about that. If anything, I read the two-year suspension announcement as a distraction from the disappointing nature of the rest of what Facebook had to say in response to the Oversight Board decision. So, this post is about the 20-page document buried at the end of Facebook’s announcement today; and those 20 pages constitute a largely milquetoast response from Facebook to the FOB’s substantial policy recommendations.
The headline is that Facebook says it is “committed to fully implementing” 15 out of 19 recommendations, adopting one recommendation in part, still assessing two recommendations and taking no action on one. But the devil is in the details. [Continue reading…]