The NPR Politics Podcast - Trump's Facebook Ban Remains, For Now

Episode Date: May 5, 2021

Facebook's moderation board has upheld the company's decision to suspend Donald Trump's account because of posts expressing support for rioters, though the board says Facebook should determine whether or not the ban is permanent within six months.This episode: political correspondent Juana Summers, tech correspondent Shannon Bond, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Kori, a high school debater from Roseville, California. Right now, I'm getting ready to compete at the virtual statewide CHASA debate championships by listening to my Hype Up playlist and, of course, the NPR Politics podcast. This podcast was recorded at 12.03pm on May 5th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Enjoy the show! Oh my gosh, I'm having high school debate flashbacks right now. Glad I'm not back in high school.

For sure. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Juana Summers. I cover politics. I'm Domenica Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And today we've got NPR tech correspondent Shannon Bond with us. Hey, Shannon. Hey, guys. So a few months ago, Facebook asked its oversight board, which it set up to review content moderation decisions, whether its indefinite suspension of President Trump's page was appropriate. Now they've made a ruling. We should acknowledge that Facebook is a financial supporter of NPR. Shannon, can you tell us what the board said? Yes. So the board has said that Facebook's decision to ban Trump in the wake of the insurrection at the Capitol was justified. They said they agreed with Facebook that Trump had broken its rules against praising violence. We agree that Facebook had sufficient justification

to suspend Mr. Trump's account, at least for the duration of what the Department of Homeland Security called a, quote, heightened risk of violence. And so, you know, it says Trump does not have to be allowed back immediately on Facebook and Instagram. What the board, though, took issue with is that Facebook has framed this suspension as indefinite. It didn't give a time period. It didn't say he's permanently banned and it didn't say he's suspended for 30 days or two weeks or, I don't know, six months.

We hold that it was improper, that is to say, in violation of Facebook's own rules, as well as generally accepted principles of freedom of expression, for Facebook to make that suspension indefinite. And so the board says, that's not OK. You actually need to give a clear definition of how long he suspended or just suspend him permanently. And so now they've given Facebook six months to make to make a decision about that. So we know what the board has said. Domenico, how has former President Trump responded to all of this? Well, he released a statement after the

decision, and he essentially said that it was a total disgrace and embarrassment to the country. He said that free speech has been taken away because of, quote, radical left lunatics being afraid of the truth, that the truth will come out anyway, bigger and stronger than ever before, and called them corrupt social media companies, that they have to pay a political price, never again allowed to destroy and decimate the electoral process, which, of course, there's a lot of holes in that. They don't have any say in the electoral process. But clearly, he's not happy with this ruling that he's not allowed to be back on Facebook. And there's big reasons for that, because there's big money in what he and

his campaign, potential campaign, could do on Facebook. Before we delve into the politics of this more, Shannon, I'm wondering if you can just tell us who makes up this board and what it's actually empowered to do. Sure. So this is a board that has been created and funded by Facebook. It's funded through an independent trust. And it is it's made up of 20 people right now. They are sort of people with expertise in law and human rights. There's the former prime minister of Denmark. There's a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, sort of this blue ribbon commission. And the idea is that they review the really the toughest decisions Facebook is making about what it allows. So realistically, they're only reviewing, you know, a handful of decisions

over the billions of pieces of content that are posted on Facebook every day. But Facebook has agreed that its decisions about this content, so about whether or not Trump should be allowed back on the platform, but also, you know, whether a certain post should be taken down or not, that Facebook will abide by it. And then in addition, the board can also make recommendations about Facebook's policy, which Facebook can take into consideration but does not have to follow. And just to make sure that I am getting this right, when you look at the rationale behind the oversight board's ruling, it didn't have anything to do with lying about the election, right? It was more about praising people who were committing violence. Yeah, this was a very narrowly construed, this question that

Facebook put to the board. It said it had made this decision to ban Trump based on two posts on January 6th in which he was essentially praising the rioters. And they said that goes against their rules. And the board said, yes, we agree. At the time of those posts, there was this clear risk of harm. And he was supporting people involved in causing that harm. Domenico, when we talk about the politics, there are so many different angles to dig into. But I want to start with the money. Facebook was such a huge part of how President Trump was able to cultivate the small dollar donors that fueled his campaigns.

Yeah, it is. And I think we should draw a distinction between Facebook and Twitter because Facebook is really about the money. And Twitter has always been about the message and controlling the news narrative, because that's where sort of the elites, reporters, celebrities, etc, are on that. And Trump's not getting that back. You know, Twitter has already said that he's permanently banned, he's not getting it back. Trump himself says, you know, I don't I will never go back anyway. I don't know if that's, you know, kind of like saying I quit to your boss before they can say you're fired. But you know, I don't I will never go back anyway. I don't know if that's, you know, kind of like saying I quit to your boss before they can say you're fired. But you know, there it is anyway. But Facebook, while it sort of doesn't get the attention that Twitter does, from a messaging

standpoint, it has meant big, big money for the Trump campaign. I mean, Brad Parscale, who ran his digital campaign in 2016, and was for a short time his campaign manager in 2020. Remember said that Facebook was the method by which they won. He said, quote, it was the highway in which his car drove on for Trump, they spent upwards of $100 million on ads on Facebook between the two campaigns based on various trackers. But they were able to raise, you know, at least two and a half to three times that from people on Facebook, they could micro target them, they could find exactly the slice of people that they wanted to get to, whether it was supporters, or swing voters, and, you know, funneling the kind of information, some of which was false,

misinformation, stuff that had gotten flagged by Facebook and really made them have to figure out what their policy was going to be, which partially the oversight board said, look, you got to come up with something that's consistent, which maybe they're going to have to think about over the next six months. All right. We're going to take a quick break. More about all of this when we get back. believe this. What happens when the local news outlet isn't fact-checking conspiracy theories, maybe encouraging them? Listen now from NPR's Invisibilia podcast. And we're back. Shannon, it seems like this is exactly the position that Facebook did not want to find itself in. It now transparently has the final say over whether

former President Trump is banned or not. Yeah, I mean, I think that is absolutely the position that they're in and that they didn't really want to be in. They've said for a long time, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, has said, you know, we don't want to be the arbiter of truth. And they've said, you know, our critics have a point. This is too much power for a private company to have to decide who gets access to these platforms with billions of users, right? But that is exactly actually what the Oversight Board criticized Facebook for trying to do. It accused Facebook of trying to avoid its responsibilities by basically telling the board that they should be making this final call. And it said, no, it is up to you to make this call. And frankly, it has always been up to Facebook to make this call, right? I mean, even this board with its own creation. But now it's very clear that they are going to have to come up with an answer that they're going to have to defend. And this is something that the critics of the board have said is a real issue here with its legitimacy. Is it just sort of a cover for Facebook to duck responsibility. It also seems like this is something that's going to reignite criticisms

from conservatives who for a long time now have made the argument that big tech companies, Facebook chief among them, are in the business of intentionally suppressing right-wing voices. Yeah, I mean, that is a constant line of criticism, despite the fact that, you know, there's not just no evidence to support it. There's actually evidence showing that, you know, right wing conservative content does particularly well on social media, especially on Facebook. But that's absolutely true. It is going to encourage that. This is already being, you know, this issue has already been takenchairs today, the oversight board co-chair, you know, said, you know, part of the problem with this lack of transparency and the sense that, you know, I think everyone has about Facebook that it doesn't apply its rules evenly. It's not necessarily clear. Sometimes it feels like it's making it up as it goes along.

That in itself fuels these perceptions of bias. And that is a problem for the company that the company needs to fix. And it's become a thing that Republicans have just hammered away at, you know, being able to raise money off of being able to get themselves attention to talk about, you know, Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri, for example, you know, even has a book that he pinned his Twitter account, you know, about the tyranny of big tech. And he's on all kinds of shows today talking about it. He noted, you know, Facebook's real oversight board, the Democrats, you know, and he's even talking with former Trump campaign chairman Steve Bannon today on, you know, his platform to talk about the tyranny of big tech again. So this is the kind of thing that they have been talking

about. This continues to add fuel to what to their argument, going this way, punting or even permanently banning him, actually, in a weird way is good for Republicans, because they're able to still have this outrage machine that's going to mean lots and lots of money. Domenico, this also kind of surfaces a big problem that the media as well as corporate political donors have been wrestling with, which is how to engage with politicians who continue to refuse to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the election and who have been misleading the public about the integrity of this country's electoral system. Well, and just look at what's happening on Capitol Hill.

I mean, all this comes in the context of Republicans being on the verge of ousting Congresswoman Liz Cheney from Wyoming from her leadership post because she continues to speak out about how Trump was lying about the results of the 2020 election being fraudulent. And, you know, she's not shirking away from that issue. And that's a thing that's really rankled a lot of the rank and file and people in the conference who just wanted her to stop. Shannon, I feel like we have to just point out here that it's a little bit wild that we're right now covering whether private companies can or cannot permit the president of the United States to do something. It's kind of a really stunning example of the rights companies have in this country, but also a little bit unsettling in some ways, just how these technology companies can regulate or not regulate speech. Yeah, I mean, that is the really naughty, thorny, just difficult issue at the heart of this, right, is that, you know, these are private companies,

you know, and actually, you know, some of the proposals that we've seen, especially from, you know, from Republicans about, you know, really limiting some, you know, social media companies' ability to ban politicians or to moderate content at all. I mean, those actually infringe on the company's First Amendment rights, ironically. But this is an issue that the companies themselves are uncomfortable with, right? Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey of Twitter have talked about this. They don't want to be in this position making these decisions. But the truth is they've built these enormous platforms. And I think the other issue here and the reason it's, you know, I think there's a lot of valid criticism of Facebook's

oversight board. Is this, you know, is this actually independent in any way? Is this real accountability? But I think part of the problem is there isn't, we don't have another alternative right now, right? Like, do people want government moderating speech online? Like, it's not clear who we think should be making these calls, other than that we're very unhappy with the people who are making them right now. Well, I mean, it is a huge issue. And the fact is that our regulations for this kind of thing have not adapted to the internet age. I mean, they're for railroads and oil companies, essentially. And Congress, as we've seen from a lot of these hearings, don't even have the language of how to deal with tech companies. They seem so out of step with how they even run their business that it makes it really hard.

And you have essentially a company like Facebook, which is part of having cornered the market with Google when it comes to online advertising. Google and Facebook have more than half of all the online ad revenue. So you really have two companies with humongous market share, and you are in this weird position where you have a private company that is essentially regulating public speech with no regulation whatsoever coming out of Washington for how to guide or direct them how to do that. But as you say, it's also a way for a lot of these politicians to fundraise, right? And that situation is it's also a way for a lot of these politicians to fundraise, right? And that situation is not necessarily a bad situation for a lot of politicians in Washington.

Yeah, they're going to milk the cow however they can. Even if they allow them back on, they'll figure something else out. All right, we are going to leave it there for today. Shannon Bond, I know it's a busy news day. Thanks for spending some time with us. Oh, yeah, glad to be here. I'm Juana Summers. I cover politics. I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.