Trump’s Ban from Facebook Is Upheld, but Panel
Orders Review (Wall Street Journal)
Oversight board says company must decide in coming
months whether the former president is permanently locked out of the platform
Facebook Inc.
was justified in banning then-President Donald Trump, the company’s independent
oversight board ruled Wednesday,
but didn’t appropriately explain if or why the former president should be
permanently locked out of the social-media platform. The board gave Facebook
six months to determine whether Mr. Trump should be permanently banned and, if
so, to explain that decision more fully. The decision, which is binding,
largely ratifies a choice personally approved by Facebook Chief Executive Mark
Zuckerberg in the wake of the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot and
could have far-reaching implications for how technology companies police
political speech.
“The Board found that, in maintaining an unfounded narrative of
electoral fraud and persistent calls to action, Mr. Trump created an
environment where a serious risk of violence was possible,” the board’s opinion
stated. “At the time of Mr. Trump’s posts, there was a clear, immediate risk of
harm and his words of support for those involved in the riots legitimized their
violent actions.”
The board’s decision endorses Facebook’s assessment
of the risk in allowing Mr. Trump to remain on the platform, while also
criticizing the company’s broader approach to how it enforces its rules. The
board said Facebook failed to offer a clear explanation for Mr. Trump’s
suspension or determine its duration.
‘The Board found that, in maintaining an unfounded
narrative of electoral fraud and persistent calls to action, Mr. Trump created
an environment where a serious risk of violence was possible.’
— Facebook’s Oversight Board
“It is not permissible for Facebook to keep a user
off the platform for an undefined period, with no criteria for when or whether
the account will be restored,” the board said in its decision. “In applying a
vague, standardless penalty and then referring this case to the Board to
resolve, Facebook seeks to avoid its responsibilities.”
In a statement on Wednesday,
Mr. Trump criticized the decision as a “total disgrace” and reiterated his
complaint that the tech companies’ moves against him are an assault on free
speech. “These corrupt social media companies must pay a political price,
and must never again be allowed to destroy and decimate our Electoral Process,”
he said.
The board sidestepped taking a position on whether political
favoritism played a role in Facebook’s decision on how to handle Mr. Trump. In
a conference call after the decision was announced, board Co-Chairman Michael
McConnell said the possibility is a legitimate concern. “When you do not
have clarity, consistency and transparency, there’s no way to know,” said Mr.
McConnell, a Stanford University law professor. “This is not the only case in
which Facebook has engaged in ad hockery.”
A recent Pew Research Center survey found that Americans are
split on whether Mr. Trump should be barred from social media, largely along
partisan political lines. Roughly 49% of U.S. adults said the former
president’s accounts should be permanently banned from social-media platforms,
while 50% said his accounts shouldn’t be banned, according to a Pew survey done
in April.
About 88% of Republicans and Republican-leaning
independents reported Mr. Trump’s accounts shouldn’t be banned, while 81% of
Democrats and Democratic leaders said his accounts should be banned
permanently, according to the survey.
Facebook must reconsider the appropriate punishment
for Mr. Trump and explain its decision within six months. In addition to the
direct ruling, the board also issued seven recommendations for Facebook for
handling high-profile content during crises in the future. Chief among them:
explaining what its processes for such decisions are. “They cannot invent
new, unwritten rules when it suits them,” said Co-Chairman Helle
Thorning-Schmidt, a former Danish prime minister.
In a statement, Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global
affairs, said that Facebook would do as the board requested. “We thank the
board for the care and attention it gave this case,” he said. The ruling
prevents Mr. Trump from regaining the social-media megaphone that he wielded for years and that he has lacked since
the industry’s major players banned him from posting on their platforms earlier
this year, alleging he helped incite the violence at the Capitol. The move also
hampers one of his most effective fundraising tools.
While Mr. Trump isn’t known to be an avid Facebook user
personally, as he was with Twitter,
his staff regularly cross-posted his tweets there and used it to reach his more
than 35 million followers on the platform.
The Facebook decision was made by five members of the current 20-person Oversight Board,
then ratified by a majority of the full board. The identities of the five
individuals involved in the decision won’t be revealed. Funded by Facebook through an endowment established in 2019,
the Oversight Board is designed to help the company tackle its most contentious
content-moderation issues and make policy recommendations. The board operates
like a Supreme Court for content; the company can refer cases and individual
users can ask the board to review Facebook enforcement decisions.
Facebook joined Alphabet Inc.’s
YouTube, Twitter Inc. and other social-media platforms in removing then-president Trump after
accusing him of inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. The riot,
which left five people dead, followed a speech by Mr. Trump alleging
that November’s election had been stolen from him and
calling on his supporters to take their grievances to Congress.
Mr. Trump has denied wrongdoing, and his lawyers in
the unsuccessful impeachment hearing against him called it “patently absurd” to
suggest that he incited violence. Mr. Trump was impeached by the House and was
acquitted in the Senate. The former president has said repeatedly that he
believes Silicon Valley’s biggest tech firms are biased against him and
conservatives generally.
Facebook took down the president’s account after
determining that two of his posts from that day violated its prohibition of
praise for dangerous individuals and organizations. In those posts, Mr. Trump
called for peace but said the rioters’ rage was justified.
The major social-media platforms all took action against
the president’s posts that afternoon, then formalized more lasting suspensions
in the following days. Facebook announced its ban in a post by Mr. Zuckerberg. “We
believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service
during this period are simply too great,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote in a Jan. 7 post,
arguing that Mr. Trump was seeking to use the platform to disrupt the peaceful
transition of power.
Twitter has since declared its ban of Mr. Trump to be permanent,
while YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has said the platform will allow his return when it is “safe” to
do so. These decisions have drawn criticism from many Republican lawmakers, who
say technology companies are censoring right-leaning viewpoints, and some
civil-liberties groups have likewise expressed concern about the industry’s
control over political speech. Some world leaders unaligned with Mr. Trump also
questioned his removal, with Germany’s Angela Merkel calling the silencing of a
head of state problematic.
Many Democratic lawmakers and civil-rights groups have said the
companies were too slow to act against Mr. Trump’s provocative social-media
activity, which they say set the stage for the violence in the wake of the
election. Without a major social-media platform since the takedowns, Mr. Trump
has been communicating with his followers via written press statements. He also
maintains a direct line to supporters through his campaign’s email database,
through which he is fundraising for his political-action committee.
The decision could have major business implications for
Facebook. A number of major advertisers temporarily boycotted Facebook last year in
protest over what they said was the company’s ineffective policing of hate
speech. Facebook in recent weeks has reached out to advertising agencies in
calls and emails to describe the board’s process and emphasize that its
corporate management has no sway over the decision, advertising executives
said.
Facebook is the only company to have submitted its
decision to outside review and comment.
Three weeks after suspending Mr. Trump from the platform, Facebook’s Mr. Clegg
called the ban “necessary and right” but said it was important for the board to
consider the case and offer guidance on how to handle alleged misbehavior by
heads of state. The board received voluminous feedback in advance of the
decision, getting more than 9,000 public comments, as well as a brief from Mr.
Trump.
More on Trump and the Facebook Ban:
Is Donald Trump Still Suspended From Facebook? Here Is
What the Oversight Board Decision Means
Trump Copes With Facebook, Twitter Ban by Relying on
Email, Media Interviews
Inside ‘Facebook Jail’: The Secret Rules That Put Users in
the Doghouse
Partly in response to Mr. Trump’s controversial
rhetoric about immigrants and Muslims during the 2016 presidential campaign, Facebook
carved out a “newsworthiness exemption” from its policies against hate speech.
In 2019, the company formalized protections for political figures with rules
exempting them from fact-checking, saying it was inappropriate for the company
to referee political debates. Facebook always maintained that speech that it
deems to be incitement to violence wouldn’t be tolerated from any user.
Formed last year, the Oversight Board includes lawyers,
human-rights advocates and former politicians drawn from around the world. The
board’s first round of decisions struck a free-speech-friendly tone,
with members rebuking Facebook for taking down posts questioning the sanity of
Muslim men and supporting the availability of Covid-19 treatments generally
rejected by public-health authorities. Although the board initially promised to
weigh in on Mr. Trump’s ban within 90 days, it postponed the decision to
consider public comments.
— Alexandra Bruell and Suzanne Vranica contributed to
this article.
Donald Trump and Social Media
Related coverage, selected by the editors
Oversight Board Upholds Trump's Facebook Ban
Trump's Facebook Ban: What to Know
How Facebook's Oversight Board Works
Inside ‘Facebook Jail’: The Secret Rules That Put Users in
the Doghouse
Podcast: An Interview With a Member of the Facebook
Oversight Board
Facebook Suspends Trump Indefinitely
How Twitter, Facebook Shrank Trump’s Social Reach
Video: The Rules of What Can Be Said on Social Media
Write to Jeff Horwitz at Jeff.Horwitz@wsj.com
Too bad he himself cannot be simply flushed away.
ReplyDeleteBan Him Forever (The Atlantic)
ReplyDeleteTo send the right message, Donald Trump’s removal from Facebook must be permanent. This morning an oversight board created by Facebook approved the company’s January decision to indefinitely suspend Donald Trump from its platform, and gave the company six months to clarify the duration of the suspension. The result is a bit of a procedural dodge. There is only one reasonable path available for the company to take: Ban the former president permanently.
The reasons for this are straightforward. In many ways, the question of sanctions for Trump is no different from the theory of how a society sanctions any sort of misbehavior. Understanding how a punishment is generally chosen can help answer the question of what the “right” result for Trump is.
The first concept to consider is that of “general deterrence.”
The question here is how to set the sanction at a level that will persuade others not to commit similar acts. Given that not all bad actors are caught, the theory of deterrence is that the penalty imposed must be significant enough to deter others. Put simply, how will the sanctions on Trump impact other political leaders on Facebook? Will it embolden them, or will it give them pause? Permitting Trump to return would tell future leaders that serial falsity is relatively costless. To send the right message, the ban must be permanent.
Next comes the question of “specific deterrence,” or “disablement.” Distinct from general deterrence, this asks whether the speaker needs to be effectively disabled from engaging in prohibited acts in the future. A serial robber cannot rob while he is in prison. So here we look at Trump and his nature and ask whether he is likely to be a repeat offender. The answer seems clear. If Facebook restores Trump to the platform, he will lie again, and when he does, Facebook will have to again banish him from the platform, at least for long enough to prevent him from damaging the next election. (If Trump is reinstated, I recommend saving this article; it’ll be relevant again in a year or so.)
Finally, there is the factor of contrition. To what extent has the actor acknowledged the nature of his prior acts and demonstrated remorse or behavioral adjustment? The greater the contrition, the less severe the sanction. By contrast, in the absence of a clear recognition of culpability and harm, it is reasonable to believe that the actor will repeat the activity even at risk of additional harm. This renders severe sanctions more compelling...
The Atlantic:
ReplyDeleteCan anyone looking at these factors seriously doubt what the result should be? Just consider the harm Trump has done with his megaphone. Four months ago, a violent mob stormed the United States Capitol in an attempt to overturn the presidential election. That insurrection was incited by a lie—the lie that the election had been “stolen” and that Trump was the true winner. Far from fading away, that lie has metastasized and become an article of faith among some voters. It has also become a litmus test of loyalty—so much so that one cannot, it seems, continue to hold a position of leadership in the Republican Party unless one is willing to shove the riot down a memory hole and publicly embrace as truth that which is manifestly false. The election lie was spread by many, but the lead proponent was Trump himself. He used Facebook, and other social media to propagate the falsehood—postings that led to violence and death at the heart of American democracy.
At no point has Trump demonstrated contrition, and every signal has indicated that he remains undeterred. Indeed, one can make the argument that Facebook acted too late and with insufficient force. By not banning Trump earlier, Facebook enabled and encouraged more and more brazen posts by Trump and other high-profile speakers precisely because there was no sanction. Given that, does anyone realistically think that if he is allowed back on the Facebook platform, Trump will not return to his fraudulent ways?
If any evidence was needed, on Monday, Trump made clear that he has no plans to refrain from continuing to spread falsity. In response to claims that he was lying about the election, he issued a statement declaring, to the contrary, that the 2020 election itself “will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!”
Were this persistent dishonesty just the repetition of a casual lie of no import, it would be of no practical moment. One can, for example, persist in a counterfactual belief that the Earth is flat, and this creates no societal harm. But Trump’s lies are more than that; they are an imminent and persistent danger to democracy itself.
Years ago, considering a question of free speech, Justice Robert Jackson gave voice to a cautionary idea: “The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”
He was speaking about government regulation of speech and the dangers that came from the lack of limits. But what he said then is equally true today of commercial social-media platforms and their moderation of the content they host. The platforms are, themselves, the product of a robust liberal democracy in which order and liberty contend daily. The social-media platforms cannot allow themselves to become the germinating soil for the seeds of their very own destruction and that of the society that enabled them. By dodging a final decision and throwing the burden back on Facebook, the oversight board merely postponed the inevitable reckoning.
May 5, 2021