 The social media company's oversight board has decided not to allow former President Trump back on the platform. The ruling from an independent oversight board created by Facebook says the social media company was right. When Facebook's oversight board recently upheld the platform's ban on Donald Trump, the decision drew mostly negative reviews. It's a joke. The oversight board had one job, give us a clear opinion about whether Facebook was right to suspend Trump from the platform. They come back with maybe? Facebook has really never suffered any consequences themselves for allowing dangerous lies and disinformation to linger on its platform. What Facebook, Twitter and Google have done is a total disgrace and an embarrassment to our country. But the critics are wrong in at least two major ways. First, the board made the right call in this case. It agreed that Facebook was justified in shutting down Trump after he twice posted praise of violent rioters even as they raised hell in the Capitol. It also correctly found that Facebook violated its own terms of service by suspending Trump indefinitely. The board has given Mark Zuckerberg and company up to six months to render a final decision on the former president. Second, and more important, the board is a serious model for non-state governance in cyberspace. The oversight board comprises 20 individuals with backgrounds in tech, law, politics and free speech activism. It's funded by an irrevocable trust set up by Facebook and has a legally binding final say over suspension. Only up and running since the start of this year, the board has already been twice as likely to overturn Facebook's decisions as it is to uphold them. A strong show of accountability and seriousness of purpose. In one case, the board restored images of naked breasts in a post about cancer that had been removed by an automated system. The board chastised the platform for making the decision without proper human oversight. In another, Facebook had removed a post that inaccurately quoted Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and compared him to Donald Trump. Because Goebbels is on a list of prohibited people, the site took down the post even though it was intended as critical of both the Nazi and Trump. Any rules which restrict freedom of expression must be clear, precise and publicly accessible, read the decision, which also faulted Facebook for failing to inform the user why his post was originally taken down. These people are really focused on trying to take the independence part seriously. It's if they want to prove the critics wrong about being dependent and kind of a PR stunt. Political scientist John Samples, who's a vice president at the Cato Institute, is a member of Facebook's oversight board. He says that a private company moderating content on its platform is fully in keeping with libertarian principles. On the one hand, no content moderation, people judge and then, you know, probably people build tools for controlling your feed. On the other hand, you had this corporation that existed that was a voluntary association and it was in the business again of maximizing value for shareholders. To do that was not compatible with no content moderation. And as Samples argued in a 2019 policy analysis, government regulation of social media is likely unconstitutional because it violates the individual's right to free speech. It's also the issue that Facebook itself to curate its platform and to in pursuit of maximizing the shareholder value. Samples stresses that content moderation is inevitable because platforms want to create a particular sort of community, but also that it's really hard to do consistently at scale. He also underscores that Facebook can't and shouldn't be all things to all people. And that the best outcomes will always come from having a variety of different platforms doing a lot of different things in a lot of different ways so that people can pick and choose among alternatives. You don't want one set of rules for the entire world necessarily, but you also may need different platforms and different kind of entities providing these services. I would like to see difference rather than sameness. That sort of experimentation which has been central to the success and growth of different social media platforms won't be possible if a growing course of critics gets their way and forces uniform rules via regulation or antitrust. Republicans in Florida are trying to restrict social media platforms from banning users while Democrats in Colorado are pushing bans on hate speech. Progressives like Elizabeth Warren and conservatives like Josh Hawley talk about treating social media platforms as common carriers akin to telephone companies that would be tightly regulated by the government. Such arguments for government oversight may well carry the day, and if they do, we'll all be more limited in not just what we'll be able to say, but where we can say it.