Facebook’s Oversight Board ban of Donald Trump is totally arbitrary and ideological

Whether Facebook’s Oversight Board decides to allow former President Donald Trump back on its platform Wednesday is an exercise in distraction from a far more significant point: the raw power an unaccountable, private platform has to memory-hole a president of the United States.

Facebook, with its 3.45 billion monthly global users across its products, is far and away one of the biggest speech platforms the world has ever seen. What content the company suppresses or amplifies changes the flow of information, opinion formation and the nature of independent thought around the world for billions of people at a time.

This was most recently on display when the company temporarily canceled Australians over a dispute about ad revenue – and in doing so, removed critical hubs for the distribution of news, public health and safety information. It was also demonstrated when the government of Myanmar successfully used Facebook – which in Myanmar is largely indistinguishable from the internet – to perpetuate a genocide.

USA TODAY Tech: Will Donald Trump’s Facebook, Instagram bans stick? Facebook’s Oversight Board to issue ruling Wednesday

In 2018, Facebook conceived of an Oversight Board as means to give its entirely subjective content moderation decisions the veneer of objectivity and expertise. But this board has no real power. Its members are selected and compensated by Facebook, and its decisions cannot stray outside of the content moderation parameters set by the company without input by the board. 

As Big Technology writer Alex Kantrowitz has framed it, the Oversight Board is concerned solely with the company’s outputs and very little with the machine, or system, itself.

Facebook’s ideological bias

And the machine is what matters. For the world, Facebook’s moderation decisions are a legitimate struggle between the norms of free speech and the consequences of censorship at scale. But for Facebook, this dispute is really a choice between profits and progressive ideology.

Rachel Bovard: Twitter ban on Donald Trump’s account was only the beginning of Big Tech’s crackdown

Facebook is a speech platform, but also a digital ad agency. The company reaps billions from algorithmically juiced viral content, literally profiting from content addiction and polarization. But Facebook is also a global speech platform in the grip of woke employees clearly bent on enforcing ideological rigidity.

According to Facebook, Donald Trump was banned for “actively fomenting a violent insurrection.” In March, this was expanded to include any content “in the voice” of Donald Trump, when the company yanked an interview the former president did with his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump.

Facebook's Oversight Board said it will accept cases from users who object to content posted by others and who have already exhausted Facebook’s appeals process. (Photo: Richard Drew, AP)

Yet Islamic State terrorism recruitment propaganda still circulates on Facebook. House Democrats who objected to the 2016 election outcomes have not been similarly de-platformed. The account of Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., who recently took to the Minnesota streets in an already tense political environment to demand protesters “get more confrontational” if Derek Chauvin was not convicted, remains unmolested. Same with the account of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who openly sought to overturn the election outcome of a 2020 congressional race in Iowa.

That is because none of this is about some objective commitment to norms. It is about enforcing an ideological agenda that protects prominent progressives from criticism while ensuring that Americans – and users around the world – are exposed to only the “correct” kind of groupthink.

Hand in glove with liberal government

No private platform should have this kind of power. Regardless of what the Oversight Board decides, Facebook has already written the script for authoritarian regimes around the world to balkanize their own internets as a means of silencing political dissent, diverse thought and counternarrative speech.

Despite the repeated bleats of the left that the incumbency of Donald Trump represented fascism on our own shores, private companies working hand in glove with one political ideology is definitionally fascist. And that is what we are seeing, from the outsourcing of censorship to social media companies, to the corporately enforced deflection of criticism of progressive political figures, to the Department of Homeland Security considering deputizing private firms to surveil U.S. citizens online as a means of circumventing constitutional restraints.

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Regardless of what Facebook’s Oversight Board decides, its decision is trivial. Even if it lets the former president back on its platform, the mid-level management at Facebook will not stand for it. Some nontransparent community standard will be magically conjured and retroactively enforced, resulting in Trump’s removal once again. Facebook’s massive, unaccountable authority over global speech should not be normalized or legitimized solely due to the presence of a self-appointed board of overseers.

President Donald Trump in 2019. (Photo: Alex Brandon, AP)

The fundamental problem remains unaddressed. The cat-and-mouse game between the corporate overlords – who now represent the most influential speech, thought and news gathering platforms in the world – and an American style of democracy – that depends on pluralism, dissent and the ability to speak and be heard in our global, digital public square – will continue unabated.

Rachel Bovard is the senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute and a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors. She is co-author of “Conservative: Knowing What to Keep,” with former Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, and a senior adviser to the Internet Accountability Project. Follow her on Twitter: @RachelBovard

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