Facebook can’t kill, jail, or tax you. It can only stop you from posting on Facebook.
Charged with determining whether Facebook erred in suspending former President Trump following the January 6 Capitol riots, the Facebook Oversight Board—which exists solely for the purpose of taking difficult content moderation decisions out of Mark Zuckerberg’s hands—essentially shrugged and returned the decision to Facebook. The board did rule, however, that the indefinite suspension was inconsistent with the company’s policies, and Facebook should revisit the matter in the next six months. A conceivable outcome of this ruling is that Facebook will eventually decide, sometime later this year, that it has little choice but to un-ban Trump. Indeed, the board criticized Facebook for “applying a vague, standardless penalty.” One might have expected tech-skeptical conservatives to be somewhat pleased with this ruling, since it was ultimately a rebuke of Facebook, and one that hints at the potential return of Trump. Instead, the right had a meltdown. “Twitter and Facebook are Fascist companies,” tweeted (yes, tweeted) Candace Owens. “We should all begin slowly migrating away from their platforms.” Rachel Bovard of the Conservative Partnership Institute opined that the actual issue was Facebook’s “hegemonic control over global political speech, reinforced today by the platform anointing itself with the moral authority to memory hole future world leaders at their own discretion.” Facebook has neither hegemonic control over political speech nor memory-hole powers—indeed, the former president recently engaged in political speech with Owens, possibly offering her the veep slot if he runs again—and yet many conservatives argue that the Facebook Oversight Board’s decision was not merely wrong but evidence that Facebook’s powers supersede the U.
