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Comment by oh_sigh | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see a short essay written by each board member about their general views of Trump, along with how their vote went.

I don't really see it happening, but it will be very weird in 2023 if Trump re-runs for election but is still banned from all the major social media sites.

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It won't be weird. There's http://thedonald.win still online and is very active - and they ban/block any counter narratives, hypocritically "censoring"/blocking like what they're complaining about.

They were forced to move to https://patriots.win/ after losing control of the domain. I think they've built an interesting Reddit alternative with what appears to be a solid effort from a small team. I don't mind topic-based communities that specifically state their goal is to promote an idea or a particular theme and banning off-topic content. If they create a general Politics community and then proceed to do that, yes, that would be hypocritical.

Facebook and Twitter have always branded themselves as trying to connect the world. And now they (along with other big tech cos) have grown actively hostile to the half of the U.S. at least that considers themselves conservative. That's a big issue.

Is there any concrete metric by which you'd say Facebook is hostile to the conservative half of the US? The top-performing links on Facebook are consistently conservative, as are many of the members of this Oversight Board.

Are they allowed to post whatever they want on Facebook?

I regularly see people from across the political spectrum insist that Facebook censors their speech while allowing their political opponents to say anything. They can't all be right, although they could all be wrong. So I'm not sure any sort of subjective account is really going to help me figure out the difference.

I think we need to start requiring people to be more specific: what speech of theirs is being deleted/moderated - is it lies, hate, violence? They should show exactly what's being deleted/moderated, show us and then we can have conversation with depth to it.

That isn't specifically targeting conservatives though - causation vs. correlation.

Lol, the President of the United States was banned? What metric do you need?

I need a metric a lot better than "lol", because I know lots of people who think it's obvious that Facebook is biased in favor of conservatives. (If it weren't, they say, the president would have been banned sooner.)

If anything, the fact that he _wasn't_ banned until recently despite indulging in behaviour that would get any normal person banned could be read as evidence to the contrary (though I don't think it _should_ be; both Twitter and Facebook have an IMO misguided policy that national leaders should be handled with kid gloves and allowed do pretty much anything).

Just a note that they recently moved to patriots.win, as the owner of their original domain split with them. I haven’t had much time to study their moderation/censoring practices yet, but have been visiting occasionally out of curiosity.

I would argue that if their board is not ideologically and geographically diverse that there can be nothing even close to resembling neutrality. That being said, I think moderating for anything other than abusive or illegal statements on a platform as large as Facebook is a Sisyphean task.

You can look at their board on their site - it is people from all over the world, with a variety of professions.

Yeah, how many blue collar auto mechanics do they have on the board? Sailors, construction workers, firefighters, etc? How many ex-patriates of communist countries do they have on the board? How many moms with no college degree are on the board? How many Vietnam vets are on the board?

It's a stacked list of academics. Academia is a subculture in and of itself that is not in any way reflective of the world at large.

Moderating any content on a platform as large as Facebook is going to by Sisyphean.

'Abusive' requires definition to be worth discussing. I consider lies abusive in the context of politics, for instance.

I was curious about the board and spent an hour or so viewing the Twitter pages of each (most had one). Many had expressed sentiments critical of Trump in the past week or so. Some in a way that reflects directly on the issue at hand. Not a clear indicator of how they will judge this case, but interesting nonetheless.

From what I’ve read of their procedures they will publish some reasoning for their ruling as well as dissents, but unlike the US Supreme Court these will not be publicly attributed to the member writing them. Understandable for their own safety I suppose.

Facebook is a private company and free to do this however they want, so I’m not trying to be overly critical here— just found it interesting to learn a little about this private version of a court.

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