Facebook Oversight Board to Facebook: Come Clean About January 6th
This week, the Facebook Oversight Board decided to uphold Facebook’s suspension of former President Donald Trump, who was booted from the platform hours after inciting a violent white supremacist insurrection at the United States Capitol to interrupt the certification of Electoral College votes that sealed his defeat in the 2020 Presidential Election.
But, the Oversight Board did not rule definitively. While it did find that the evidence “shows that Mr. Trump used the communicative authority of the presidency in support of attackers on the Capitol and an attempt to prevent the lawful counting of electoral votes,” it also found that “it was not appropriate for Facebook to impose the indeterminate and standardless penalty of indefinite suspension,” since “Facebook’s normal penalties include removing the violating content, imposing a time-bound period of suspension, or permanently disabling the page and account.” So, the Oversight Board says Facebook has to go back to the drawing board, sort out its policies and make a final determination about Trump’s account within six months.
The Oversight Board also put another demand to Facebook- for it to come clean about how its platform contributed to the violence at the Capitol. The Oversight Board said that “Facebook should undertake a comprehensive review of its potential contribution to the narrative of electoral fraud and the exacerbated tensions that culminated in the violence in the United States on January 6, 2021,” and that this review “should be an open reflection on the design and policy choices that Facebook has made that may enable its platform to be abused.”
Partly, this is because Facebook refused to answer questions about these matters in response to requests from the Oversight Board. The Oversight Board “asked Facebook 46 questions, and Facebook declined to answer seven entirely, and two partially. The questions that Facebook did not answer included questions about how Facebook’s news feed and other features impacted the visibility of Mr. Trump’s content; whether Facebook has researched, or plans to research, those design decisions in relation to the events of January 6, 2021; and information about violating content from followers of Mr. Trump’s accounts.” The Oversight Board apparently sought clarification from Facebook about how it amplified Mr. Trump’s posts after the election and any internal company analysis about how it otherwise contributed to the events of January 6.
Will Facebook comply? It’s hard to imagine it will do so. On some level, such evidence might get very much to core questions about whether Facebook’s design affordances and business model are fundamentally dangerous to democracy. Sure, we’ve seen such reviews before- Facebook did hire an independent company to do a human rights impact assessment of its role in the genocide in Myanmar in 2018, and it did conduct an independent civil rights audit in 2020. But Mark Zuckerberg has already stated plainly- to Congress, in fact- that the person who should be held responsible for January 6th is former President Donald Trump. And the company moved quickly to restrict access to a critical internal report about its own failures to recognize the harm of the Stop the Steal movement that grew on its pages and in its groups in advance of the insurrection.
I argue this inquiry should be part of the investigation conducted by a National Commission, given subpoena power by Congress. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s stalled proposal to establish the Commission includes a focus on social media- it says the remit of the Commission should include investigating “influencing factors that contributed to the domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol and how technology, including online platforms,” and says that technology expertise must be included amongst the Commissioners. This is crucial- we need to understand more about the phenomenon University of Washington researcher Kate Starbird described in a recent presentation on January 6th, the Big Lie and participatory disinformation. Starbird describes the dynamics that led to January 6 Attack in terms of the way the information ecosystem was weaponized by Donald Trump and his supporters:
According to a recent Reuters/IPSOS poll, 60 percent of Republicans continue to believe the false claim made by Trump and his supporters that the 2020 election was stolen due to widespread election fraud. We need to understand the role that Facebook and other platforms played in creating an alternate reality that remains a danger to American democracy.
On this score, some members of the Oversight Board recognized an important reality: that even if the company decides that Donald Trump should have a path back on to the platform, Facebook should require “before Mr. Trump’s account can be restored, Facebook must also aim to ensure the withdrawal of praise or support for those involved in the riots.” In other words, the only way he can begin to rehabilitate himself is to help reconcile his supporters with the truth. It’s hard to imagine that ever happening- but it’s crucial that, as a society, we do everything we can to destroy the false claims that animate the Big Lie.
Call your Representatives. Demand a National Commission. Let’s not leave it to Facebook to conduct this investigation, and let’s not leave it merely to law enforcement and a few occasional Congressional hearings to get to the bottom of January 6th and the conditions that made that bloody day possible. It’s too important. We need the truth.
ICYMI
- This week the State Department announced the United States will join the Christchurch Call to Action to Eliminate Terrorist and Violent Extremist Content Online, “formally joining those working together under the rubric of the Call to prevent terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting the Internet.”
- “Social and psychological forces are combining to make the sharing and believing of misinformation an endemic problem with no easy solution,” reports New York Times journalist Max Fisher in this review of recent research, including the work of Dartmouth professor Brendan Nyhan.
- In an announcement, New York Attorney General Letitia James said her office had completed an investigation that found multiple entities were responsible for a set of campaigns that drove millions of fake comments, messages, petitions, and letters designed to influence the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) 2017 rule making process on net neutrality. The disclosure raises questions about how more sophisticated systems may be used to perpetrate such attacks in the future.
- The Oath Keepers are apparently having trouble recruiting and raising money ever since the Capitol Riot, according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News.
- The US Capitol may be closed to visitors, says CNN, but last week attorneys for dozens of the defendants accused in the January 6 insurrection took a tour of the scene where the attack took place.
- A Republican state legislator from Oregon was charged for misconduct and trespassing in the US Capitol on January 6, according to the New York Times.
Coda
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We have a running joke/dialogue in the Twitter DM room where Greg, Melissa and I share links about all of the UFO stories of late. There was the big piece in the New Yorker two weeks ago, and more recently a really weird video caught on a Ring camera in Florida. We’re looking forward to the public report- required by law- of the the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. It was set to release the report about UFOs on June 1, but there is some concern the task force might miss its deadline.
“I don’t know if there are aliens. I don’t know if they visited here. I’m not, you know, when you talk about that stuff, everyone gets, you know, stigmatized about it,” Senator Marco Rubio- who created the law that requires the disclosure- apparently told TMZ. I don’t know, I read it in The Hill. “My thing is very simple,” said Rubio. “We don’t know what that stuff is that’s flying over the top of our installations. Let’s find out.”
That’s it for me this week — Greg will send the next newsletter in two weeks’ time. Until then: stay cool.
