The Facebook oversight board, popularly known as the “Facebook Supreme Court,” the body established by the company to check its content moderation decisions, has ruled on its first cases.
The oversight board is reportedly set to consider whether or not to uphold Facebook’s decision to permanently ban Donald Trump, although it is currently unclear when a decision on the matter will be made.
As Breitbart News previously reported, the oversight board is packed with left-wingers, including the former editor of the left-wing British newspaper The Guardian, a former left-wing prime minister of Denmark, and someone who once compared Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler.
The oversight board was the brainchild of Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, one of the Democrats’ star impeachment witnesses in the first impeachment of President Trump.
The former editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, reportedly told fellow board members that they should “start with the supremacy of free speech.” Yet one of the board’s early decisions upheld Facebook’s bans of users for so-called hate speech.
In the second case, a user posted a term to describe Azerbaijanis that Facebook interpreted as a slur. The board similarly ruled that “the context in which the term was used makes clear it was meant to dehumanize its target,” and upheld Facebook’s decision.
In another case, the board ruled that Facebook had incorrectly implemented its hate speech policy.
In the first case, Facebook had removed a post from a user in Myanmar who appeared to disparage Muslims as psychologically inferior. While the company decided that the post violated its policy, the board ruled that the terms used “were not derogatory or violent.”‘
In three other cases, the board voted to overturn Facebook’s content moderation decisions. Despite the board upholding the company’s “hate speech” enforcement, NBC News reported this as a sign that the board “intends to err on the side of free speech.”
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. His new book, #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election, which contains exclusive interviews with sources inside Google, Facebook, and other tech companies, is currently available for purchase.