26 May 2025
The Meta Oversight Board in the Trump Era
In its latest decisions following major policy shifts at Meta, the Oversight Board appears to be moving toward a more permissive approach to harmful or discriminatory content. This post argues that such a trend could reshape the boundaries of acceptable speech online and raises pressing questions about the Board’s independence and role in an increasingly politicised content governance landscape. Continue reading >>
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11 May 2021
Trump’s Indefinite Ban
After months of waiting, the Facebook Oversight Board has upheld Facebook’s ban of former President Donald Trump. Beyond the merits, the decision underlines a trend showing how the FOB is applying protections of free speech. The FOB’s increasing reliance on the principle of proportionality and transparency is a paradigmatic example of an ever-growing distance to the First Amendment dogma characterising US constitutionalism and the proximity to the European (digital) constitutional approach. Continue reading >>16 February 2021
The Facebook Oversight Board and ‘Context’
The standout conclusion of the Facebook Oversight Board's two hate speech decisions is that the Board's assessment of content removal heavily relies on context. This is only reasonable, as any speech issue is context-dependent. But the FOB’s context-assessment is incomplete, just as its decisions further highlight Facebook’s content moderation flaws, which likewise fail to consider context. Continue reading >>
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10 February 2021
Constitutional Review via Facebook’s Oversight Board
For all its disorienting novelty, the Facebook Oversight Board’s recent debut thrust us back to a familiar script, that of the emergence of constitutional review, much like the bpower reclaimed by the US Supreme Court in Marbury v Madison. The resemblance not only passed unnoticed; commentators emphatically deny it. I pick up on this strangely recurrent historical parallel and argue that at closer inspection, the OB’s first set of decisions are, indeed, the Marbury v Madison of platform governance. Continue reading >>05 February 2021
Shedding Light on the Darkness of Content Moderation
With the Facebook Oversight Board, we face a new age of private adjudication of online content, which promises an alternative system to enforce human rights on a global scale, while marginalising and hybridising constitutional values and democratic safeguards. Digital constitutionalism offers a framework to look at this new form of private adjudication of online content and its challenges. A look at the FOB’s first cases is an opportunity peek behind the scenes of content moderation, as well as a laboratory to study the transnational challenges which the information society has raised to global (digital) constitutionalism. Continue reading >>
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29 January 2021
Facebook’s Oversight Board Takes on the Curious Case of Donald J. Trump
Facebook announced last week that it would refer the question of its decision to remove Donald Trump from its platforms to the Oversight Board. The case concerning the former President’s account marks a notable departure from the approach through the initial slate of Oversight Board cases announced in December and resolved this month. The decision the Board takes -- which will be binding, Facebook says -- could have major implications for the future of platform governance. But it may also force Facebook to reckon with its past. Continue reading >>
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19 December 2020