3 March 2021

An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Decisions by Facebook’s “Supreme Court”

Janny Leung (University of Hong Kong)

After the (now former) president of the United States was blocked from accessing his social media accounts, the world is beginning to wake up to how much power private companies have in controlling public discourse. Facebook, for example, has been policing speech at a larger scale than any national government or intergovernmental organisation has ever done. Recently, Facebook has established an Oversight Board and empowered it to selectively review the company’s content removal decisions. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective that crosses between linguistics and law, this working paper analyses the first five decisions issued by the Oversight Board, teasing out challenges in language and interpretation that Facebook faces, pointing out constraints and shortcomings in its existing approaches, and analysing to what extent the Board helps promote the company’s legitimacy and transparency through its decisions. The paper concludes by reflecting on how the private governance of public speech forces us to rethink existing theories of free speech.