Facebook Oversight Board Upholds President Trump Ban

Facebook’s Oversight Board is not allowing President Trump back on the site. The board of 20 political leaders, journalists and human rights activists chosen by the social media giant made their ruling Wednesday morning.

This came after Trump’s page was suspended in early January and the board received over 9,000 comments regarding the case, which is more than any other case before.

Skeptics of the process are calling it a “sideshow” that hardly addresses the flaws in the site’s content moderation practices.

“They hire contractors both domestically and internationally to assess content on a constant basis,” explained Gautam Hans, a law professor at Vanderbilt University. “They would prefer that we don’t know about that because the existence of human-mediated content moderation belies the idea that this can be done effectively at scale and without bias, but of course it’s always going to be impossible to have a computer make these kinds of judgment calls because they’re notoriously context-dependent.”

The decision will have lasting effects as the board has been delegated to also provide recommendations for handling political leaders’ accounts in the future.