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Thread. There's been rather a lot happening this week so perhaps I missed the discussion on the FB Oversight Board's first decided cases - if so please point me at it - but first sight is deeply bizarre..
I've coincidentally been rereading good ol LICRA v Yahoo! France & US for my LLMs. The key point of that case was the struggle across borders between French law, which banned proNazi speech, and US law, which didn't. French law won in France and US law, sort of, in US. Go figure.
Now here we have FBOB deciding if FB was wrong to remove French content which falsely claimed certain drugs were cures for COVID. Spoiler: FB got it wrong. Why? Because in France you couldn't buy the drugs in question over counter so no danger of "imminent" harm..
..so the decision is premised on Fr circumstances (albeit with caveat that French speakers outside Fr might be reading it, which also came up in Y!). But not on French law. Of which there is no mention whatsoever. FB community standards yes. International human rights yes. 2/n.
.. but doggedly. No national law. FB say, if you dig about, that "The board is committed to keeping users safe and abides by country-specific laws. Because of this, not all content decisions are eligible for appeal." Presumably this case was deemed eligible.
.. But er what does France think? What about their interpretation of free speech and fake news? Could this decision be appealed, somehow, to a French court? Was France asked if they wanted the content removed? to supply an amicus brief?..
..if not, have we ceded that the jurisdiction of France is trumped by the law of Facebook? Is it 2000 all over again? FB didn't after all need to refer to FBOB. They could have referred instead to the French courts as the place were harm was felt..
.. again a test recognised in transnational civil law and in the LICRA case itself. In LICRA the content was indubitably illegal whereas here it is misinfo; possibly harmful rather than illegal. But states care about that and have locus too - cf the Online Harms Bill in UK.
.. so are French people (and public health authorities) happy at this outsourcing of their legal system? Maybe this has all been debated to death. It certainly has in the context of deplatforming Trump. But at least that was a US norms based company struggling with US speech.
The lack of commentary on the transnational element here seems somewhat bizarre. Compared to the old days of Usenet or the new days of http://Google.fr et al, FB here manages to make itself look like an extraterritorial sovereign island very successfully.
..the point here isn't whether the Oversight Board got it right or whether FB did. Which is cleverly what debate will be distracted to. It's that we have ceded the process as legitimate, both empowering FB as sovereign and exculpating it from responsibility. It ain't 2000 again.
