3/16/21
If you are a public official, there’s no more effective or efficient place to lie than on Facebook. It’s company policy — meaning the policy of the chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg — to roll out the red carpet to all manner of political falsehood and obfuscation. Mr. Zuckerberg has said that it’s not the company’s job to “be arbiters of truth” and that allowing posts from well-known people allows the public to make informed decisions. Yet every day Facebook blocks or deletes posts from Average Joes who violate its policies, including propagating untruths and hateful speech. Facebook made the right decision to indefinitely ban Donald Trump from contributing to the site following his dangerous (and policy-violating) posts inciting January’s terrifying blitz on the Capitol. The company’s outside oversight board — a handpicked, global set of scholars, journalists, politicians and other luminaries — is reviewing the suspension and will rule in the coming weeks. The board should uphold the decision to keep Mr. Trump off the site. If the oversight board were to restore Mr. Trump’s account, it would stand as an affirmation of Facebook’s self-serving policies permitting the most divisive and engaging content to remain and a clarion call to leaders like Rodrigo Duterte and Jair Bolsonaro to keep on posting.
It’s not as though Facebook didn’t have ample evidence that its site could and would be used to incite real-world violence. Left to its own devices, the company allowed bigoted and provocative posts to remain, such as Mr. Trump’s threat to protesters after George Floyd’s death that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” an external audit found. So, Mr. Trump most likely felt emboldened after spending years flouting Facebook’s rules about election misinformation, the pandemic and the glorification of violence with only feeble blowback from the company. Incitement is, as they say in Silicon Valley, a feature, not a bug. There are legitimate concerns over whether the suspension of Mr. Trump reflects the immeasurable power amassed by technology firms to control and guide public discourse. But the law is clear that Facebook is exercising its own First Amendment rights to regulate speech on its own site, including from the president. Sadly, it took four years of Mr. Trump’s divisive posts and bald attempts to undermine our democracy — not to mention a new administration — for Facebook to act on that. The Facebook oversight board has the opportunity to defend the sanctity of the democratic process and draw a line in the sand for those who, like Mr. Trump, would undermine it with false claims that an election was stolen or fraudulent. Upholding the former president’s social media ban would go a long way toward achieving that.
