Madison, the seminal US case establishing the Supreme Court’s power to strike down legislation. A recent post by evelyn douek, a leading expert on content moderation, discusses the Board’s “jurisprudence,” while another by deputy editor Jacob Schulz introduces it to unfamiliar readers as “a nascent court-like review board.” According to a Lawfare team, the upcoming Trump decision “may turn out to be a comparable milestone” to Marbury v. The influential American blog Lawfare, which publishes extensively about social media and speech regulation, has even adopted this terminology wholesale.
This has attracted another wave of media and scholarly attention.Ĭommentators on these events typically echo Feldman’s original description of the Board as a “court,” and accordingly use legal vocabulary to describe it. Shortly afterwards, it announced its decisions on its first five cases. In January, the Board was directed by Facebook to review the company’s controversial decision to suspend then-US President Donald Trump’s account. Facebook generously funded a trust to ensure the Board’s financial independence, created a charter and bylaws, and in May 2020, announced the Board’s first 20 members: an illustrious list including a former prime minister, a Nobel Prize-winning press freedom activist, and several legal academics and former judges. CEO Mark Zuckerberg liked Feldman’s idea of creating a body of independent experts to review Facebook’s most significant and controversial content moderation decisions, and officially announced the launch of the Facebook Oversight Board later that year. The idea of a “Supreme Court for Facebook” was first raised in January 2018 by Noah Feldman, a US constitutional law professor and friend of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.
European and Transnational Governance NetworkĪcademic and media discussions typically frame the Facebook Oversight Board as the ‘Supreme Court of Facebook’ - this is, however, deeply misleading.Ĭontinuing to use this analogy so prominently in fact only aids Facebook’s self-serving corporate PR narratives, and ultimately obscures more relevant issues and research.
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