evelyn douek

An op-ed by Evelyn Douek: No one has set any clear standard about how badly a politician can break Facebook’s rules before getting kicked off the platform, and yesterday the company’s wannabe court missed a chance to fill the void. In a decision anticipated with the fervor that might attend a high-profile Supreme Court ruling, the Facebook oversight board told the platform that, while it might have been right to ban then-President Donald Trump on January 7 for his role in stoking the Capitol riot and because of the risk of continuing violence, the ongoing “indefinite” nature of the ban is not justified. The board gave Facebook six months to go back to the drawing board and work out what to do with Trump’s account now. But this is the exact question Facebook had asked the board to settle. The board respectfully declined. In fact, the board’s decision resolved essentially nothing—except that Facebook wasn’t exactly wrong on January 7—and leaves open the possibility that this whole charade will happen again before the year is out.

Facebook tried to pass the buck on former president Donald Trump, but the buck got passed right back. For several years, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has pushed the idea that he and his company shouldn’t be in the position of creating the rules of the road to govern the personal expression of billions of people. He went so far as to dedicate $130 million to fund an independent panel of outside experts to which the company could outsource the thorniest decisions about what types of content — and voices — should be allowed to stay up on Facebook...But on Wednesday, the 20-member panel punted the decision back to Facebook, recommending the company decide within six months whether to permanently ban or restore Trump’s account. He is currently suspended “indefinitely,” a one-off penalty outside Facebook’s usual rules. The board, set up to act as a “Supreme Court-like” body to police Facebook’s content decisions, scolded the company for trying to pass it off, too...Others said it was the board refusing to do its job. “Their role is to constrain Facebook’s, and Mark Zuckerberg’s, discretion,” wrote Evelyn Douek, a Harvard Law School lecturer, in a Lawfare article Wednesday. “The [Facebook Oversight Board] has declined to do that almost entirely, and did not even provide meaningful parameters of the policies it calls on Facebook to develop.”

Facebook’s Oversight Board on Wednesday upheld the social network’s temporary suspension of Donald Trump but declined to decide when, or whether, that ban should be lifted. The decision dashed the former president’s hopes for a swift reinstatement by a body charged with reviewing the platform’s content moderation practices. But it also sent a message that the scope of the board’s power is limited and that the ultimate responsibility for these questions still lies with Mark Zuckerberg and company...Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who has chronicled the board’s evolution, told me she’s seen evidence in its early decisions that “the board is chafing against the very limited remit that Facebook has given it so far.” She would like it to go farther in pushing for transparency. For instance, she said, it could call on Facebook to reveal the Trump ban’s impact on an internal metric that it calls “violence and incitement trends.” The board did take a small step in that direction on Wednesday. Among its policy recommendations, it called for Facebook to undertake a “comprehensive review of its potential contribution to the narrative of electoral fraud and the exacerbated tensions that culminated in the violence in the United States on January 6.”

An article by Evelyn Douek: The long international nightmare is not over. By now, you will have read that on Wednesday the Facebook Oversight Board (FOB) upheld Facebook’s Jan. 7 restriction on former President Donald Trump’s account, largely on the basis of the ongoing violence at the time of the posts that led to the ban. But the FOB did not settle the matter for once and for all: It punted the question of what to do with the account now back to Facebook. It dinged Facebook’s “indefinite” ban as a “vague, standardless penalty”—“indefinite,” according to the FOB, is very much not synonymous with “permanent.” Now, Facebook has six months to conduct a review of what to do with Trump’s account. The decision is meaty and educational. It contains a number of recommendations which, if Facebook follows, will significantly improve the clarity and mitigate the arbitrariness of Facebook’s decision-making. It is also an attempt to split the baby—not letting Trump back on, but also not demanding a permanent ban of his account—and to avoid the inevitable controversy that would have attended any final decision.

The Republican Party appears to be signaling they want to essentially excommunicate from leadership Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Tennessee Republicans want to ban lessons on systemic racism in schools. President Joe Biden aims to vaccinate 70 percent of adults by July 4th. Tomorrow, Facebook’s oversight board is set to announce whether Donald Trump can return to the company’s platforms. Guests: London Lamar, Michael Lewis, Evelyn Douek, Adam Conner.

On Jan. 6, as an angry mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, President Donald Trump posted on Facebook that his supporters should “remember this day forever.” “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously and viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly and unfairly treated for so long,” he said in a post. In response, Facebook did something it had resisted for years: banned Trump’s account indefinitely for inciting violence...The Oversight Board is evaluating the determination — which Facebook says was made during extenuating circumstances — at the company’s request. Facebook says the rulings of the independent, 20-member body are binding. The company does have a hand in picking board members, which include a Nobel laureate and a former Danish prime minister, and paying them through a separate trust. “This is just the start of an experiment, but it can’t be where it ends.” said Evelyn Douek, a lecturer on free speech issues at Harvard Law School. “In some sense, we are all playing Facebook’s game by taking the Board seriously as a legitimate institution. On the other hand, no one has a better alternative right now.”

Facebook temporarily hid posts calling for the resignation of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, marking the platform's latest foray in a series of controversial decisions affecting free speech in a country experiencing a full-blown COVID-19 crisis. On Wednesday, the world’s largest social network said that posts with the hashtag or text #ResignModi “are temporarily hidden here” because “some content in those posts goes against our Community Standards.” Because the posts were hidden, it’s unclear what content violated the rules of a company whose executives have often expressed a commitment to open expression... “In the context of a highly politicized environment and an ongoing emergency, it’s very concerning that Facebook isn’t being more transparent about this and is not commenting,” said evelyn douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School. “This appears to be core political speech at a very critical time.”

American social media platforms have long sought to present themselves as venues for unfettered free expression...The pandemic made a mockery of that idea...Evelyn Douek is a doctoral student at Harvard Law School and an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. As an Australian scholar, she brings an international perspective to free speech questions. In a new article published by the Columbia Law Review, she argues that the pandemic exposed the hollowness of social media platforms’ claims to American-style free speech absolutism. It’s time, she writes, to recognize that “the First Amendment–inflected approach to online speech governance that dominated the early internet no longer holds. Instead, platforms are now firmly in the business of balancing societal interests.” In a conversation last week, Douek explained why the shift to a more “proportional” approach to online speech is a good thing, why platforms must provide more transparency into their moderation systems, and the perils of confusing onions for boobs. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

An op-ed by Evelyn Douek: On Monday, Facebook vowed that its staff was “working around the clock” to identify and restrict posts that could lead to unrest or violence after a verdict was announced in the murder trial of the former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. In a blog post, the company promised to remove “content that praises, celebrates or mocks” the death of George Floyd. Most of the company’s statement amounted to pinky-swearing to really, really enforce its existing community standards, which have long prohibited bullying, hate speech, and incitements to violence. Buried in the post was something less humdrum, though: “As we have done in emergency situations in the past,” declared Monika Bickert, the company’s vice president of content policy, “we may also limit the spread of content that our systems predict is likely to violate our Community Standards in the areas of hate speech, graphic violence, and violence and incitement.” Translation: Facebook might turn down the dial on toxic content for a little while. Which raises some questions: Facebook has a toxic-content dial? If so, which level is it set at on a typical day? On a scale of one to 10, is the toxicity level usually a five—or does it go all the way up to 11?

Apple Inc. plans to make the social-media app Parler available through its App Store again, the computer and smartphone company said in a letter to lawmakers on Monday. Apple removed Parler from its app store in January, citing objectionable content. In a letter to Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, both Republicans, Apple said Monday that a revised version of the Parler app with improved content moderation would be approved for release to Apple users...Apple had previously denied an earlier attempt by Parler to seek reinstatement. Evelyn Douek, a Harvard Law School lecturer who studies content moderation, said that tech platforms, including Apple, need to provide clearer guidelines as to what content is acceptable. “If Apple wants to get into the game of playing gatekeeper on the basis of content, it should be a lot more transparent about its requirements,” Ms. Douek said.

If former President Donald Trump manages to get back on Facebook and Instagram this month, his win will rest on a series of close calls. Facebook’s oversight board is expected to rule in the coming weeks on whether to uphold or overturn Trump’s indefinite suspension from the platforms, which the company imposed after the Jan. 6 Capitol riots over fears he might incite further violence...The oversight board’s decisions so far would seem to offer favorable omens for Trump: It has ruled against Facebook and ordered content restored in almost every case it has reviewed since its launch before the 2020 U.S. elections...The early rulings showed that the board values free expression “very highly,” said Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who has closely followed the oversight board’s work. “They put a lot of weight on the importance of voice and the importance of free expression and free speech and they really put the onus on Facebook to heavily justify any restrictions that they wanted,” she said.

All eyes are on Facebook’s oversight board, which is expected to decide in the next few weeks if former President Donald Trump will be allowed back on Facebook. But some critics — and at least one member — of the independent decision-making group say the board has more important responsibilities than individual content moderation decisions like banning Trump. They want it to have oversight over Facebook’s core design and algorithms...When it comes to Facebook’s fundamental design and the content it prioritizes and promotes to users, all the board can do right now is make recommendations. Some say that’s a problem. “The jurisdiction that Facebook has currently given it is way too narrow,” Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who analyzes social media content moderation policies, told Recode. “If it’s going to have any meaningful impact at all and actually do any good, [the oversight board] needs to have a much broader remit and be able to look at the design of the platform and a bunch of those systems behind what leads to the individual pieces of content in question.”

We’ve seen it all before: A congressional panel is hauling the CEOs of some of the world’s most influential tech companies to answer for their purported misdeeds. But House Energy and Commerce leaders say this time, things will be different: They are serious about legislating around issues of online extremism, including by targeting tech’s liability shield, Section 230...Roughly one month out from the Facebook Oversight Board’s ruling on whether to let Trump back onto the platform, a wider battle is already swirling around the group of outside experts: Can they create a global standard for free speech on the world’s largest social network? ... “The Board is applying international human rights law to Facebook as if it was a country. That’s impossible,” Evelyn Douek, an online content expert at Harvard, told Mark. “It’s the first body that’s using international human rights law to make content decisions. Now that we’re getting down to brass tacks, it’s difficult.”

YouTube videos are a critical source of online misinformation, yet they often get a pass in broader discussions about the dangers of social media. Even in Congress. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has never had to appear alongside other social media executives for a Capitol Hill grilling, and she will not be in attendance on Thursday when Congress questions top tech executives for the first time since the Jan. 6 Capitol attacks... “There have been hearings where you can’t count on one hand the number of questions about YouTube, which is ridiculous given the level of impact,” said Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who researches online speech...YouTube has massive influence over Americans' media consumption. YouTube has the highest reach of any platform among American adults, with 73 percent of Americans reporting they use the platform in a 2019 Pew Research Center survey. Facebook is the only social network that comes even close to YouTube's reach, with 69 percent of Americans reporting they use it...That's problematic because YouTube faces unique challenges in detecting and removing disinformation and extremism from its platform. It's technically more challenging and time- consuming to comb through videos than to simply search for terms in text. “I do not understand why she hasn’t been called,” Douek said. “There is no question that Jack Dorsey should have to answer that she shouldn’t.

Conspiracy theorist David Icke’s lies about COVID-19 caused Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Spotify to ban him. But on Amazon, Icke, who believes in the existence of lizard people, is recommended reading. ... Unlike other platforms, Amazon has not taken steps to remove COVID-19 misinformation entirely, or at least from its recommendation systems. Amazon’s approach means it’s profiting from sales of the conspiracy theory books, said evelyn douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who studies global regulation of online speech. “There's a strong argument that if you're making money off it, you should take more responsibility,” said douek.

An amazing thing happened last week when Facebook banned links to news articles in Australia. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s long-overlooked news app became the country’s hottest. The ABC app jumped from around 1,000 daily downloads to more than 15,000 in a day last week, according to mobile intelligence firm Apptopia. And by the time anyone looked up, it occupied the top spot on the country’s iOS and Google Play app stores. Facebook enacted its ban to protest an Australian law that would make the company pay news publishers. But instead of crushing ABC, the ban set it free...There are parts of the world that primarily get their news from Facebook, but it’s unlikely they’ll simply give up on news if it disappears from the platform. And though the dearth of news coverage did lead to spikes in engagement for politicians on Facebook in Australia — presumably from people seeking to fill the void — an absence of news links over time would change people’s behavior on Facebook. Scrolling for something to get mad about may well give way to curiosity about friends and family. Many in Australia have indeed been thrilled about their news-free news feeds. When Harvard lecturer Evelyn Douek asked her Australian friendswhat they thought, they could barely contain their enthusiasm. “It’s great actually,” wrote one. “Peaceful,” wrote another. “Who in the world would rely on Facebook for news???” wrote one more. News publishers, for one, still do rely on Facebook for news. And Facebook still relies on them.

In early February, politicians from India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party started signing up for a social network that almost nobody had heard of...The timing wasn’t coincidental. For days, India’s government had been locked in a fierce tug-of-war with Twitter, which defied a legal order to block accounts critical of India’s Hindu nationalist government, including those belonging to journalists and an investigative news magazine. In response, India’s IT ministry threatened to send Twitter officials to jail. Amid the standoff, government officials promoted Koo as a nationalist alternative, free from American influence...As the global internet splinters, and mainstream platforms like Facebook and Twitter square off against nation states and fitfully crack down on hate speech, nationalist alternatives are springing up to host it, something that experts say is a growing trend. “This content wants to find new homes,” evelyn douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who studies global regulation of online speech, told BuzzFeed News. Hate speech, disinformation, harassment, and incitement that mainstream platforms have been grappling with for years are particularly problematic on platforms like Koo, she said, because those sites come under less scrutiny. “These problems come to every platform in the end,” douek said, “but with the proliferation of these alternatives, there’s likely to be far less attention and pressure on them. It also creates the possibility that there will be a global internet that has one kind of discourse, and completely alternative conversations happening on national platforms in parallel.”

Each country has its own car safety regulations and tax codes. But should every country also decide its own bounds for appropriate online expression? If you have a quick answer, let me ask you to think again. We probably don’t want internet companies deciding on the freedoms of billions of people, but we may not want governments to have unquestioned authority, either...Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, told me that even when countries like Germany pass laws about online speech, it’s still the responsibility of internet companies to interpret whether millions of posts are on the right side of the law. That goes for the United States, too, where companies are largely left to decide their own bounds of acceptable online expression. Countries and international bodies should “do more to establish more clear guard rails and processes for internet platforms,” Douek said, but “they’re never going to take decision making out of these platforms.”

On a morning in May, 2019, forty-three lawyers, academics, and media experts gathered in the windowless basement of the NoMad New York hotel for a private meeting...Since its founding, in 2004, Facebook had modelled itself as a haven of free expression on the Internet. But in the past few years, as conspiracy theories, hate speech, and disinformation have spread on the platform, critics have come to worry that the company poses a danger to democracy. Facebook promised to change that with the Oversight Board...The idea for the Oversight Board came from Noah Feldman, a fifty-year-old professor at Harvard Law School, who has written a biography of James Madison and helped draft the interim Iraqi constitution. In 2018, Feldman was staying with his college friend Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, at her home in Menlo Park, California. One day, Feldman was riding a bike in the neighboring hills when, he said, “it suddenly hit me: Facebook needs a Supreme Court.” ... Currently, users can appeal cases in which Facebook has removed a post, called “take-downs,” but not those in which it has left one up, or “keep-ups.” The problem is that many of Facebook’s most pressing issues—conspiracy theories, disinformation, hate speech—involve keep-ups...“This is a big change from what you promised,” Evelyn Douek, a Harvard graduate student who consulted with the team, fumed, during one meeting. “This is the opposite of what was promised.” Users also currently can’t appeal cases on such issues as political advertising, the company’s algorithms, or the deplatforming of users or group pages. The board can take cases on these matters, including keep-ups, only if they are referred by Facebook, a system that, Douek told me, “stacks the deck” in Facebook’s favor.

In the months leading up to the November election, the social media platform Parler attracted millions of new users by promising something competitors, increasingly, did not: unfettered free speech...The giants of social media — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram — had more stringent rules. And while they still amplified huge amounts of far-right content, they had started using warning labels and deletions to clamp down on misinformation about Covid-19 and false claims of electoral fraud, including in posts by President Trump...Why, for example, hasn’t Facebook suspended the accounts of other leaders who have used the platform to spread lies and bolster their power, like the president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte? A spokesman said suspending Trump was “a response to a specific situation based on risk” — but so is every decision, and the risks can be just as high overseas. “It’s really media and public pressure that is the difference between Trump coming down and Duterte staying up,” says Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School. “But the winds of public opinion are a terrible basis for free-speech decisions! Maybe it seems like it’s working right now. But in the longer run, how do you think unpopular dissidents and minorities will fare?” ... “I’m afraid that the technology has upended the possibility of a well-functioning, responsible speech environment,” the Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith says. “It used to be we had masses of speech in a reasonable range, and some extreme speech we could tolerate. Now we have a lot more extreme speech coming from lots of outlets and mouthpieces, and it’s more injurious and harder to regulate.”

They meet mostly on Zoom, but I prefer to picture the members of this court, or council, or whatever it is, wearing reflective suits and hovering via hologram around a glowing table. The members include two people who were reportedly on presidential shortlists for the U.S. Supreme Court, along with a Yemeni Nobel Peace Prize laureate, a British Pulitzer winner, Colombia’s leading human rights lawyer and a former prime minister of Denmark. The 20 of them come, in all, from 18 countries on six continents, and speak 27 languages among them. This is the Oversight Board, a hitherto obscure body that will, over the next 87 days, rule on one of the most important questions in the world: Should Donald J. Trump be permitted to return to Facebook and reconnect with his millions of followers? ... The board will seriously examine the Trump question, guided by Facebook’s own rules as well as international human rights law. If Facebook accepts its rulings, as it has pledged to do, as well as the board’s broader guidance, the company will endow this obscure panel with a new kind of legitimacy. “Either it’s nothing, or it’s the New World Order,” said a lecturer at Harvard Law School who studies content moderation, Evelyn Douek, who pushed Facebook to send the Trump case to the Oversight Board...Noah Feldman, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, who first brought the notion of a Facebook Supreme Court to the company, said he thought conservatives dismayed by the recent crackdown might be surprised to find an ally in this new international institution. “They may come to realize that the Oversight Board is more responsive to freedom of expression concerns than any platform can be, given real world politics,” he said.