Why We Filed A Comment With Facebook's Oversight Board

Why We Filed A Comment With Facebook's Oversight Board

3 years ago
Anonymous $K6XgmDN5_o

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210215/13153346248/why-we-filed-comment-with-facebooks-oversight-board.shtml

Back when Facebook's Oversight Board was just getting organized, a colleague suggested I represent people before it as part of my legal practice. As a solo lawyer, my entrepreneurial ears perked up at the possibility of future business opportunities. But the rest of me felt extremely uncomfortable with the proposition. I defend free speech, but I am a lawyer and I defend it using law. If Facebook removes you or your content that is an entirely lawful choice for it to make. It may or may not be a good decision, but there is nothing for law to defend you from. So it didn't seem a good use of my legal training to spend my time taking issue with how a private entity made the moderation decisions it was entirely within its legal rights to make.

It also worried me that people were regarding Facebook's Oversight Board as some sort of lawmaking body, and I was hesitant to use my lawyering skills to somehow validate and perpetuate that myth. No matter how successful the Board turns out to be, it is still limited in its authority and reach, and that's a good thing. What is not good is when people expect that this review system should (a) have the weight of actual law or (b) be the system that gets to evaluate all moderation decisions on the Internet.