At the beginning of the year, in Linux Adictos Speak quite a bit about the social media ban on Donald Trump. Now he could go back to one of them.
The Facebook Oversight Board is an outside political decision-making group with the power to restore Trump's privileges on Facebook or delete your account for good on Wednesday - the first major experiment in outsourcing harsh content moderation on an elite group of global thinkers, academics and political figures.
However, I think Trump would not have much hope.
Facebook's Vice President of Global Affairs, Nick Clegg, a former British politician (whose greatest success was giving away the best electoral flow in years from the Liberal Party to the Conservative Party) He expressed hope that the board would endorse the company's own conclusions, calling Trump's suspension an "unprecedented set of events calling for unprecedented action."
Trump would recover his Facebook or not by decision of an external committee
Facebook's Oversight Board began its work last October. Facebook can refer cases to the board, as it did with Trump, but users can also appeal to the board to overturn political decisions that affect them after exhausting Facebook or Instagram's normal appeals process.. A subset of five members of their 20 totals assesses whether the content should be allowed to remain on the platform and then comes to a decision, which the full board must approve by a majority vote. Initially, the Supervisory Board was only empowered to restore deleted content on Facebook and Instagram, but in mid-April it also began accepting cases about content that Facebook did not want to remove.
The former president has one in favor, one of his members, Pamela Karlan, a Stanford professor and Trump-critical voting rights scholar, has left to join the Biden administration. Her replacement is PEN America President Susan Nossel. Nossel wrote an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times in which he argued that extending a permanent ban on Trump “may seem right at first, but that decision would ultimately set a dangerous precedent.
Nossel will not participate in tomorrow's vote, but her appointment could indicate a trend.
The trend
The first decisions of the Oversight Board were in favor of restoring content that had been removed. In one case, the Oversight Board voted to restore an image of a woman's nipples used in the context of a breast cancer post. In another, the board decided that a quote from a famous Nazi did not deserve to be withdrawn because it was not an endorsement of Nazi ideology. In all cases, the Oversight Board can issue policy recommendations, but Facebook is not required to implement them.
Expansion
Although this is the first really relevant case facing the Supervisory Board, its members trust each other. Oversight Board co-chair and former Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt stated that other social media companies would be 'welcome to join' the project,
For the first time ever, we actually have content moderation that is done outside of one of the big social media platforms. That in itself ... I don't hesitate to call it historical.
Regardless of how tomorrow's vote turns out, Facebook may have the first PR success in a long time. Not only, unlike the other social media companies, he didn't have the last word, he also has someone to blame when either side complains about the decision.
Even I have to say that the idea is great. And, of course, much more rational than that of the Orwellian control promoted by the president of the Mozilla Foundation.