The company has created a board that can overrule even Mark Zuckerberg. Soon it will decide whether to allow Trump back on Facebook.

The article by Kate Klonick appeared in The New Yorker on February 12, 2021. Comparing Facebook’s Oversight Board to “a private Supreme Court,” Klonick reports on the eighteen months of its development – from the initial chaotic workshops with experts and the charter drafting to the Board’s first rulings. The article also gives a brief history of Facebook’s content moderation decisions and their consequences and reconstructs how Noah Feldman, a Harvard Law School professor, came up with the idea to establish the Board. Klonick’s reporting is dense with interviews that show controversy accompanies the Board’s structure, role, and decisions, including whether to keep Trump’s Facebook account suspended.

Read the article here.