Its rulings are meant to be binding and unappealable, although, like real courts, it has no enforcement mechanism its written opinions also include recommendations and “advisory statements,” which are nonbinding. The Oversight Board is supposed to be independent, or, at least, as independent as any entity can be from the company that funded the trust that pays its bills. After some fits and starts, the board issued its first batch of decisions earlier this year. In 2019, Facebook put a hundred and thirty million dollars into a trust, establishing the Oversight Board, commonly known as the Supreme Court of Facebook. Then, oxymoronically, it claimed that no Facebook user, not even a politician, was above the platform’s rules-a position that the company has reiterated many times, but that it has often honored in theory rather than in practice. It sometimes alluded to a “newsworthiness exemption,” implying that speech by political figures was inherently newsworthy, even if the same speech would have been removed had a normal user posted it. When Facebook was asked to explain itself, its responses ranged from opacity to baffling incoherence. Trump, of course, proceeded according to toddler logic, ignoring what Facebook said and instead responding to what it did, which was very little. Trump kept bending or breaking Facebook’s rules, and Facebook, either out of principle or perceived self-interest, kept exhibiting an obvious reluctance to sanction him. Throughout Donald Trump’s rise as a professional social-media troll and would-be autocrat, Facebook seemed continually wrong-footed by his misbehavior. The whole time, the buck stopped with Zuckerberg, a talented coder but not, by his own admission, an expert in human rights or global governance. As the company kept growing, though, the challenges became both more pressing and more grave: how to purge terrorists and child-traffickers from the platform when to censor medical misinformation and white supremacy whether tyrannical heads of state should be allowed to use Facebook to manipulate elections, issue death threats, or foment genocide. In the early years, many of those tough decisions-whether to expand access beyond college students, whether to add a “like” button-were relatively trivial. Since 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook in his dorm room at Harvard, he has been the one person ultimately responsible, or culpable, for every tough decision the company has made.
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