Meta’s ‘Facebook Supreme Court’ Touted As Success By Conservative Member And His Confirmation Bias

The narrative for years has been that social media companies — most of them headquartered in California — have it in for conservatives. While the real problem tends to be actual Nazis, conservatives who feel their bigoted views have been “censored” continue to pretend West Coast liberals and the Biden Administration are to blame for private companies showing them the exit.

In 2020, Mark Zuckerberg decided the people talking out of their asses must be right. Meta formed an oversight board of sorts that would backstop moderation decisions, allowing an even smaller group of people to decide whether the algorithms or hundreds of other human moderators made the right call when taking down content.

Here’s Mike Masnick’s original coverage of the new Oversight Board, which seemed to be the subject of hate simply because Facebook is almost always the subject of hate.

Last week, Facebook finally announced the original Oversight Board members and the board itself put out its own announcement combined with a NY Times op-ed from the four “co-chairs” of the board: Catalnia Botero-Marino, Michael McConnell, Jamal Greene, and Helle Thorning-Schmidt.

As was noted in that post, it was difficult to see what impact these outsiders might have on the whole of Facebook moderation. A social media site that deals with hundreds of thousands of posts every minute was unlikely to be guided, much less reformed, by bringing in four people to oversee a job thousands of others were already doing.

And the new board itself noted it would only handle an extremely small subset of complaints about content moderation, which suggested its influence on moderation would only be noticeable to the people who overrode previous Facebook moderation decisions.

That’s where we are now. Michael McConnell is making sure everyone knows this board had a hand in restoring some political content that was previously declared to be in violation of Facebook’s policies. Here’s the meat of that decision, as delivered by the ‘Facebook Supreme Court’ itself.

In August 2024, a Facebook user posted an altered picture based on the poster for the 1994 comedy film “Dumb and Dumber.” In the altered image, the faces of the original actors are replaced by the U.S. presidential candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. As in the original poster, the two figures are grabbing each other’s nipples through their clothing. The content was posted with a caption that includes the emojis “