Oh wait, you're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC. Yeah. Three, two, one. Hey, I'm Jada Munrod.
This is Radio Lab today. We have got a special collaboration with the New Yorker magazine and the New Yorker radio hour. Very excited about that. So for the last several years, we here at Radio Lab and by we, I mean, mainly Simon Adler, he, we have been watching and reporting on Facebook specifically how Facebook decides and then enforces what people can and cannot post on their site.
As many of you know, the way that they do it is they've got this rule book, one single set of rules for the many countries in the globe to define what is postable and what is it. And then they have a giant army of 15,000 souls who have to moderate all the crap that we put on Facebook. Anyhow, in doing so, Facebook has managed to piss off. Well, just about everybody.
I mean, despite all of the time, effort and money, they have thrown at this problem by taking posts down. That's a shift up. They have been accused of censoring voices across the political spectrum and infringing on users' right to free expression. And then by leaving material up, they've been accused of helping to incite a genocide in Myanmar and arguably swing the 2016 US presidential election.
And I start here with this wrap up because since we last reported on all that, Facebook has actually made a pretty big shift in how they are going to approach policing, refereeing the world's speech. It's a shift that it's going to have a massive impact on their decisions about what isn't, not allowed on the site, including the question, which we'll talk about in a second, of whether former President Trump should be banned indefinitely from Facebook. But more deeply, this is a shift that has Facebook really looking less like a company and oddly a little bit more like a government, an unelected government for the entire planet. So with all of that, let me now hand off too.
Hi. Hello, Kate. How are you? Simon.
Are you rolling on your end? There we go. Now I'm rolling. Great.
I will record myself on my phone. Yeah. So a couple months back, I called up Academic Kate Klonik to talk about this shift and this research project she's been working on documenting it. I want to be done with this project so f***ing badly.
Yeah. This has been your life. Yeah, it has a little bit too much, though. I'm ready to do something different.
Kate is a professor of law at St. John's University. She's studied Facebook often for years. And she was added again because back in 2018, Mark Zuckerberg, the company's CEO was considering this strange proposal.
Yes, like this crazy project to solve this crisis about content management. I think you know that I've been inside over the last couple, like a little over a year. Kate actually sat down with Mark to talk about all this. She did it over the computer so you'll hear some clacking of keys.
But anyway, as he told her, I said a bunch of times that I just think that it's not sustainable over time for one person or even one company's operations to be making so many decisions, balancing free expression and safety at the scale. Like I recognize that this is a huge responsibility. And I'm not going to be here forever. I like I plan to be running the company for a while, but one day I'm not going to be running the company.
And I think at that point it would be good to have built up a separate set of independent structures that ensure that the values around free expression and balance of these equities can't exist. Oh, interesting. Like I trust me, but I don't necessarily trust the next guy. Right.
And so like a benevolent dictator, he wants to devolve power away from Facebook and himself. And what he landed on as a model for how to do this was a Supreme Court for Facebook. And sorry, what exactly like what? Yeah.
So the proposal was pretty simple. It was creating a group of people from all over the world that would basically be this oversight on Facebook and its speech policies. We think of it as like the Supreme Court of the United States, but instead of overruling lower court's decisions, this Supreme Court of Facebook would be able to overrule Facebook's own decisions. It's a hard pitch to make, isn't it?
Oh my God. 100%. You can imagine how that went over. You want us to do what?
That's how I imagine that going. Yeah. But Mark wanted this to happen. And so it happened.
It's part of like a larger sense. I think that he sees Facebook becoming more and more like the government isn't even the best term, but like a system of government. And the fact that I have control to basically help implement different forms of governance. Like a long term legacy that he knows will not make terrible decisions.
This seems to be them catching up and being like, yeah, like if you've got three billion users, you're bigger than any company at that point, any country, your rules can be as impactful as any government's laws. And so you really need to start thinking of yourself in a new way. Yeah, I think that's right. Has any company ever done anything like this before?
I mean, honestly, there's nothing that even kind of comes close. And I don't want to be grandiose about this, but there is a sense in which it feels like you're watching. I felt like I was watching an experiment that would, even if it completely and utterly failed, would be remembered and be a lesson for however the world ends up sorting out this problem of online speech. And so once Facebook decided to build this court, they suddenly needed to figure out like, what cases would go to the court?
Who would be on it? How would they make these decisions? And it became clear that it's not appropriate to have a single person answer these questions on behalf of society for this institution. This is Brent Harris, who led Facebook's effort to build this board, this court.
And as one of his first decisions, he said, we need to go out and actually listen to a wide array of people about what the problems are and the challenges are that they are finding and ask them, what do they want this to be? What can we create? And so they held dozens of listening sessions all over the world, talking to lay people. But the cornerstone of this process was really six global workshops where they invited experts to come and weigh in.
Kate was one of 40 or so people that attended the US workshop. It was held in the basement of the No Man Hotel in downtown Manhattan. And when she walked in, it was like walking into a technologist's wedding. You come in, every table is decorated with succulents and bottles of voss water and an iPad.
The iPad is not for you to keep. And in fact, someone joked to one of the Facebook people, said, yeah, we used a couple of generations old iPad to make sure no one walked away with any of that. That's spectacular. But so you have an iPad and ultimately this moderator came out and tried to get the rooms attention.
And of course, everyone's half listening and most people on their phones and whatever else. And part because a lot of people in that room were just very skeptical of what Facebook was doing here. I mean, Kate herself remained somewhat skeptical of this court. This is just something Facebook can scapegoat.
It's really crappy decisions too. That was my main skeptical point in all of this. That Facebook is essentially erecting what will be just a body to absorb blame. But anyhow, the moderator explained what they were up to, that they brought these experts here to in essence, design this institution.
So what do you think this should be? What does it look like? And some of it was in answer to questions, some of those things people brought up, case selection questions, board selection, who picks the board? And I would say a solid third of it was people standing up and holding forth on topics that had nothing to do with why we were there that day.
Less of a question and more of a comment. Exactly. Totally. How so many of those?
Eventually though, they got to the heart of the matter. Like how should a global board think about these cases that are right on the edge? What we wanted to do was really put people in the shoes that Facebook is in right now and taking these decisions. So they told them like, hey, you are going to play mock court.
As a group, you're going to have to decide whether a piece of content should stay up on Facebook or come down. And so everyone was asked to open their iPad. So you were asked to like, we're going to go over the first simulation. And you'll love this Simon.
The first simulation that they did was the Kill All Men simulation. Really? Yes. Wow.
That's great. Oh, this is the thing you, the one that you focused on in the last story. I remember there was like a song in there. Yeah, it's the right.
You're totally right. We spent 10, 15 minutes dissecting this piece of content. You know what? You should play this and just be like, here's what they focused on.
Okay. Yeah. I think we only need to do about three minutes of it. But here it is.
We did this back in 2018. It's about comedian Marcia Bolsky and a photo she posted. Yeah, yes. I guess so mad.
I feel like my first one to the city, I was such a carefree brat. You know, I was young and I had these older friends, which I thought was like very cool. And then you just realized that they're alcoholics. You know, this is her up on stage.
She's got dark curly hair. It was raised in Oklahoma. How did you decide to become a comedian? You know, it was kind of the only thing that ever clicked with me and especially political comedy, you know, I used to watch The Daily Show every day.
And inspired by this political comedy, she started this running bit that I think can be called sort of a absurdist feminist comment. Now a lot of people think that I'm like an angry feminist, which is weird. This guy called me a militant feminist the other day. I'm like, okay, just because I am training a malicious woman in the woods.
At first I just had this running bit online on Facebook and Twitter. She was tweeting, posting jokes. You know, like we have all the Buffalo Wild Wings surrounded, you know, things like that. Eventually took this bit on stage.
Then wrote some songs. Anyhow, so about a year into this running bit, Marcia was born at work one day and logs on to Facebook. But instead of seeing her at normal newsfeed, there was this message that pops up. It says you posted something that discriminated along the lines of race, gender or ethnicity group.
And so we removed that post. And so I'm like, what can I possibly post it? I really, I thought it was like a glitch. But then she clicked continue and there highlighted was the violating post.
It was a photo of hers. What is the picture? Can you describe it? The photo is me as what can only be described as a cherub.
A cute little seven year old with big curly hair and she's wearing this blue floral dress. Her teeth are all messed up. And into the photo Marcia had edited in a speech bubble. That just says kill all men.
And so it's funny, you know, it's funny, you know, it's just me, whatever. Facebook had taken it down because it violated their hate speech policy. I was dumbfounded. And so back to present day, this is the scenario they put in front of these tech elites in the basement of the Nomad Hotel.
And so they were like, well, this wasn't funny. And so they were like, well, this wasn't funny. And someone else was like, does it matter whether it's funny or not back and forth and back and forth. And even so, like, should men be protected?
Like men are more protected than other groups. Eventually though, the room pretty much came to an agreement. Kill all men is clearly humor or social commentary. That should be up on Facebook.
And it's inappropriate for Facebook to take that down. Yeah, I get that. I mean, I remember when we first did this feeling like, like this is a harmless joke, right? And Facebook should be a place where harmless jokes can be.
And so I remember when we first did this feeling like, like this is a harmless joke, right? It should be a place where harmless jokes can get made. Because in this case, the joke only works because men are the power structure. If they weren't, it wouldn't be funny.
Yeah, it's punching up. There you go. It's punching up, right? But here's where things get interesting.
Because as we said, they did six of these expert global workshops. Berlin, Singapore, New Delhi, Mexico, city, Nairobi. And at each of them, they ran through this kill all men scenario. We ran that case across the world.
And something that's very, very striking is we got really different viewpoints about, should that be up on Facebook or not? Like not just at the New York workshop, but in Berlin, another Western liberal democracy, and even Singapore, folks supported leaving it up. And you'd think that folks who'd experienced more authoritarian governments in restrictions on their speech would also be for leaving it up. But it didn't go that way.
It sounds really bad. Go for it. But I understand that, like, I understand that, of course, like, it's good all men. That's the most feminist radical joke that you can make.
This is Burhan Taaye. She works for an NGO called Access Now. We need to find an extended show, right? So can you search at risk around the world?
And when she was shown this photo at the global workshop in Nairobi, which had attendees from all across the African continent, her thought was... It's very funny. And, you know, many of us are offended, might have said that once in a... No, what's boys in our life?
Right? Where you're just like, you know, yeah, you know, and I understand that to be a joke. So I'm like, yeah, of course, there should be space for humor, and I know why satire is so important. But I'm sensing a butt.
What is it? So, you know, it's a... All right, credit. So for me right now, you know, it's funny, but, you know, humor is a luxury.
And we're not... I mean, now we're laughing right now. So yes, we think on that like that, that's unfortunately quite brilliant. And, you know, we've lived through it.
So it's not something that we joke about, right? What is she... What events in the world is she thinking of when she says that? Well, there's some very recent history.
And so we're going to take a little bit of a detour here to understand why Burhan would want that Kill All Man joke, take it down. And along the way, we're going to see close-up really the life and death decisions this global cord will have to make. We'll get to that right after a quick break. This is Lauren Fury from Western Springs, Illinois.
Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred D. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloane.org. Science reporting on Radio Lab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a science foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science.
On the broad side, we take you into the heart of the south, with stories that will surprise you. Bigfoot apparently loved CloseX. Exactly. Exactly.
He's a raver. And topics that dig into the muddy margins of history. Right? The good, the bad, the ugly.
It's not clean at all. It's so messy. Wait a second. This is actually real.
Listen to the broad side. One story every week, exploring the rich traditions of the south. Jad Radio Lab here with Simon Adler. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Okay, before we went to break, we met digital rights activist Behantayé who was opposed to leaving a joke like Kill All Men on Facebook. That is correct. So, why is that? What was she thinking?
Yeah, well, I mean, it comes down to what's been going on in her home country. You have this absurdity that Ethiopia right now. Ethiopia. There's a lot of animosity between different groups, a lot of tension.
And looking at just the past four or five years there, you see how these questions of who's punching up and who's punching down can get flipped on their head with the click of a mouse. So, to set things up, Ethiopia sits right on the Horn of Africa. It's the second most populous country on the continent. And for a long time, it was considered one of the world's leading jailers of journalists.
Politically, the country used to be very authoritarian. Very repressive. This is online activist turned academic and Al-Kachala. Assistant professor at Hamley University.
And yes, I can say that me and my colleagues were like the first people blogging to Ethiopia and public. He was actually forced into exile because of this activism. And the way he tells it. 2015.
The worst unrest in a decade. The most vicious status of the most consistent protest. Student protest breakout. And they start spreading across the country.
Thousands took Ethiopia's race over the country. And watching this unfold from the United States, Dr. Chala noticed that at the center of these protests was this guy, Joar Muhammad. Yes.
Joar himself is a very tech savvy guy. He's articulate in English. If dissenting voices are loud, there is going to be sufficient pressure on the government to break its will. And he had about 1.43 million followers on Facebook.
Making him as powerful as just about any news organization in Ethiopia. Now a couple quick things about Joar. Number one, he is from the Aromo ethnicity, the largest ethnic group in the country. And we'll get more into that in a moment.
But first, the other notable thing about Joar is that at the time that these protests were getting underway, he was actually living in Minnesota. He was in exile there, thousands of miles away from the action. At least 75 people killed. But as these protests intensified, including clashes with the government.
They died. The people are killing clashes. They died. They bled up.
He was able to galvanize folks and direct things because of Facebook. Whether we live in America, Canada, or Kenya, we have communication. We have the arms of these young men. So that sort of amazingly, when these protests succeeded.
Hyla Mariam de Salen has resigned amid deadly anti-government voters there. He was lionized as well a hero. Go, hit that. One who'd helped usher in a new Prime Minister.
Ethiopia has a new leader. Abi Ahmed. Abi Ahmed won 60% And a new era in Ethiopia. Since coming to power, Prime Minister Abi Ahmed was engaged in listening to one people of the country have to say.
No, for the first time in our entire really 3000 years of history. Again, Burhan Taiye. We actually thought he couldn't be a co-host of United countries. The government freed thousands of political prisoners and journalists.
The latest of sweeping measures. Invited those in exile. To come back home, even ended a decades-long conflict with neighboring Eritrea. I promise delivered.
I mean, these changes were so profound that Ethiopia's new Prime Minister Abi Ahmed, thanks in no small part to Johar Muhammad, went on to win. The Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abi Ahmed Abi. That's right, the Nobel Peace Prize. So what you've got here is really the promise of Facebook realized, right?
Like man from thousands of miles away leverages Facebook's power to bring down an authoritarian government and elevate a peace-loving leader. I mean, this is David in Goliath-level sh**. And as part of all of these reforms, we have now established our office in Exada. Johar Muhammad returned to Ethiopia and was welcomed with open arms.
However, while Abi Ahmed's reform ambitions have increased its popularity, analysts fear that ethnic rivalries in Ethiopia will undermine his reforms. The very forces that brought this change about began pulling in the opposite direction. I'm sure you're going to get a lot of reaction from this, because everything is contesting in Ethiopia, every historical fact, everything. You see people are confused, there is information in the United States.
This is just like China's play when you compare it with Ethiopia. But yes, the first violence that happened was in 2018. The first it was brought some pictures circulating on Facebook along with different anti-ethnic minority sentiment. What were the ethnic tensions and what was being said?
Yeah, so how complicated to get or how in the weeds to get? Get complicated. Well, okay. So, as I mentioned, Johar is part of the Oromo ethnicity, the largest ethnicity in the country.
And well, the Oromo are the largest. They've also long felt politically and culturally marginalized. And this feeling of marginalization, this resentment, this was really at the heart of the revolutionary protests that Johar had helped lead. Johar, I'm just curious, are you Oromo first or Ethiopian first?
I'm Oromo first. I mean, many of his posts pointed directly at it. He would face Oromo, where we are oppressed in how Oromo's with. He was a journalist and that is absolutely okay with me because there is some historical truth to it.
But he is a guy who hit up the temperature, ramp up some emotions. As I said, we are forced to fight back, to coalesce together, to come together and fight back. But now, even with the old government out of power and a new Oromo Prime Minister in power, Johar Muhammad did not let up. He kept stoking this resentment.
To be honest with you, I think that it is a risk of not even one but catastrophic communal violence in the world of country. I think people have to bear care from that one. And with this inversion of power, statements he was making during the protest sounded very different in 2018. Like even just the line, went from being about Ethiopians getting a corrupt government out of power to Oromo's getting minorities out of their territory.
And quickly, the language began to escalate. He will ramp up with like a particular land. By the way, they are aliens. They are going to loot you.
No, they are evil. Until eventually. Of course, 2019. The riots began on the 23rd of October, 2019 and lasted for several days.
A mob took to the streets, burnt cars and killed several people. They thought about their opponents. 86 people died across the country. What caused this horrific outbreak of violence?
The Facebook post by opposition leader Jawa Muhammad. One evening from his home in Adi Sababa, Johar Muhammad posted an unsupported claim. Insulating that he is going to be killed by minorities. He called on his supporters for help.
In response, some of his followers called for war. And while Jawa denies that he was intentionally inciting violence, Hape flooded onto Facebook. Content calling for the killing of all the minority groups. Again, Burhan Taeyay.
Content actually telling people, like if your neighbor is from a different ethnic group, go and kill them. Literally that what we were seeing. And then everyone started to take things on their own hand and you know, kill minorities. Everything that could go wrong went wrong.
The minority groups were brutally murdered by the U.S. The minority groups were brutally murdered by the U.S. The minority communities were brutally targeted by the U.S. The country's largest ethnic group.
When they tried to cut my granddaughter's breast, I took out mine and I begged them to cut mine instead. Then they stopped. But they took her father instead. And since then, the government just has not been able to get back to any sort of peace.
And so every couple weeks, there's just another outbreak of this sort of violence. And so back in Nairobi, in an air conditioned conference room where this Supreme Court of Facebook training session was underway, as Burhan was sitting there staring down at this iPad with a photo on it that says, kill all men. She's like, yeah, this has to come down. You know, I'm not an Asian space to even give space to having a cognitive content governance and motivation when it's about humor.
And Burhan was not alone in this. Many people felt that is an incitement to violence, that could result in actual harm. Again, Facebook's Brent Harris. And that is something that should not be on Facebook.
And so I think around 4 p.m. to be honest with you, I left. She walked out of the session. That's just like, no, this does not address the issues that we're talking about today.
Damn, what do we do? Because it really is a we. What do we do if the very thing that people in New York in an ironic way say, must stay up, is the very thing that makes her walk out because it's just utterly privileged and completely ignorant of the real life consequences of hate speech. That's wow.
And keep in mind, these are just mock trials, training sessions really. Like, they ran into this as they were trying to answer how to answer these sorts of questions. And now we will get to some of their actual rulings and the Supreme Court itself. Yes.
And then at first, I think that the tension we're seeing here goes deeper than this one example. I mean, at the core of Facebook is this very American understanding of freedom of expression. And you hear this even in the way Facebook executives just talk about the company. And more people being able to share their experiences, that's how we make progress together.
You know, how many times has Mark Zuckerberg said some version of this? Most progress in our lives actually comes from individuals having more of a voice. But when you talk to people from different parts of the world, there's not universal agreement on this. And I definitely tell you that I found myself, oh my goodness, I was not as liberal as I could.
Again, Professor Indal Kachala. If you look at Facebook came and overwhelmed with information, we didn't have a well-established faculty-checking system, we didn't have journalism, solicitions. We, Ethiopia, have only imported Facebook. We haven't imported the rest of the institutions and democratic foundations, the economic security around which such untrammeled freedom of expression is beneficial.
So, well-spained years ago, eight years ago. I thought that freedom of expression and technology will help us liberate us and get us out of authoritarian system. Now, I have seen people get angry and they will take matters on their own hand. That's what happened.
So, it's about a choice between a cold distance or a thing whatever you want to say. It comes down to that for me. And as I've seen the violence that those speakers have made, I think that would be quite a distance. And to put that opinion in perspective here.
80% of these people are not American. 8-0? Yeah. Really?
Yeah. And that's being done by people that have no freaking idea about our way of life. And unfortunately, it's us that are being affected over and over again with these things than you guys. I mean, is there anyone openly advocating for just abolishing Facebook?
Yes, but I don't think anybody's taking that particularly seriously. But I mean, come on. At a certain point, if a private company becomes so potentially toxic to the very basic functioning of a decent democracy, I don't know, man. I don't know.
Unless you can somehow break Facebook into a Balkanized set of internets where each one has its own separate rules. That's even possible. Well, engineering-wise, it is possible. Facebook, in a few rare instances, already does employ some version of this.
I spoke to Monica Bicart, who is Facebook's head of global policy. And she explained that there are certain slurs that are outlawed in specific regions but allowed everywhere else. And similarly, they do have to abide by local laws. But she did go on to say that, quote, if you want a borderless community, you have to have global policies and that she doesn't expect that to change.
No. That's crazy. You're going to have to be so astute and so aware of regional context and regional history. I just don't think that's possible.
So actually, now that I'm saying it a lot, I think they should be outlawed. I don't know. I'd suddenly talk myself into a very extreme position, but it suddenly seems like what other solution is there? Well, the solution Facebook has landed on is this Supreme Court.
After those global workshops, they took all that feedback and created this independent structure. It's going to have 40 members. It currently has 19. The members represent every continent other than Antarctica.
And they're from just a wide array of backgrounds. Some are lawyers, others are free speech scholars, activists, journalists, even a former prime minister of Denmark. And among the first decisions they're going to have to make is whether or not former President Trump will be banned from the platform indefinitely. Facebook has currently banned him, but it will be up to the board to rule on whether that band should remain or be lifted.
And this decision won't just impact Trump. It could very well have implications for how Facebook will deal with political figures, not just in the United States, but in places like Ethiopia. Hello, hello. Hey Simon.
Minef. Very nice to meet you virtually here. You're doing it. I'm good.
How are you, sir? All right. And while making the right decisions for the entire planet seems in many ways impossible, when I sat down and talked to several members of this court, of this board, I have to say they did make me a little bit hopeful. Thanks so much for being willing to do this.
I hope we can have a little bit of fun here today. I hope so. Yes. I think we should make as much controversy as possible.
I think he's a member of the board, former special rapporteur to the United Nations, and he's basically spent his entire life fighting for human rights. And what struck me about him right off the bat is just how unfaithbook he is. I haven't used Facebook or Twitter myself. Really?
I'm old school. I try to keep my private life private. Why the hell were you chosen to be on the oversight board of a product that you don't even use? Why?
Yeah. Because of all kinds of people have been chosen for it. I mean, that's a beauty of it, doesn't it? We have all kinds of people on the board.
All kinds of people. And that he sees the solution here in the incremental progress we've made in the past. I see this work as human rights work. I have gone through in my life two different things around hate speech using radio in first of all, in Gwanda, then in Kenya as well.
The media can be abused. And then how do you reign them in? How do you mitigate them? And how do you mitigate them in a way that doesn't abuse human rights?
So the tools and the problems is basically the same. The differences, that media, mainstream media before social media has been regulated over time decades and years that then informed and guided how the information is put out. He said, just look at the five second delay that live television runs on now. I'm sure when it started the live television and live radio, it was on the go.
So I think that's the questions we have to now deal with Facebook. But I think I have confidence that there is enough experience in the world that's dealt with these phenomenals. And this feeling resonates with most of the people I spoke to at Facebook. I mean, I spent about 15 years working on climate before I came to Facebook.
And I think the issues here are deeply analogous. Again, Brent Harris. They are human generated. There are major regulatory actions that are needed.
There's a serious responsibility by industry and a step up and think about the responsibility that they hold. And the solutions that will come forward as we start to figure out how to address these types of challenges will inherently be incremental. And at times I worry we will kill off incremental good progress that start to address these issues because they don't solve everything. You know, is the Paris agreement enough?
No. Is it a lot better than what we had before? Yes. Is the Montreal Protocol enough?
No. Is it a substantial step forward against this challenge? Yes. And building this board is only one step in a wide array of many other steps that need to be taken on.
It sounds to me. The way you're saying is this is the first piece in this global governance body Facebook is imagining. Well, if it really works and people end up leaving in it and thinking it's a step forward, then further steps can be taken. There are nothing that are perfect.
There are nothing that are perfect. There are always going to be issues to criticize the specific people who are on it, a criticized process. And I mean, when Kate Klonick, who turned us on to this story to begin with, when she interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, he said as much. It's not like the oversight board at the end.
It is one institution that needs to get built as part of the eventual community governance that a government said, and I think we will end up having 10 years from now or everyone who takes that to build all this out. It just felt like a good concrete step that we could be okay. And what they're thinking of in terms of next steps. One would be something like regional circuits or a level of adjudication that are more regional or more localized that sits below this board as a means of taking these decisions.
You mean like seven continental courts or I don't have 52 sub-regional courts that feed up to the one Supreme Court? Yeah, that's right. And so what we're watching spring up here is not just a solution to what is truly one of the problems of our moment, but also this wholly new way to organize ourselves and sort of adjudicate our behavior. And look, look, what to try to do is I'm expiring.
I cannot tell you to work. I can tell you will try to make it work as much as possible. And will we make mistakes? I'm an absolute.
I have got no doubt in my mind that being the humans we are not yet evolved to into saints and angels, we will make mistakes. That's part of the process. The oversight board started officially hearing cases in October. They've already ruled on matters ranging from whether nude photos advocating breast cancer awareness should stand to whether a post about churches in Azerbaijan constitutes hate speech.
Real quick before we go, an update, actually. Since we first reported this story, the oversight board has come to a decision about President Trump. They chose to uphold Facebook's ban. Meaning, well, you won't be seeing posts from him in your timeline any time too soon.
This story was produced and reported by Simon Adler with original music throughout by Simon. Is this original music by Simon that we're hearing right now? Simon? It is indeed.
All right. As we said at the top, this episode was made in collaboration with the New Yorker Radio Hour and New Yorker magazine to hear more about the intricacies of how this court came to being, the rulings they've already made, and what's coming up on their docket. Check out David Remnick and reporter Kick Clonick's conversation in the New Yorker Radio Hour's podcast feed or head over to New Yorker Radio Hour dot org. And on that note, a huge thank you to Kick Clonick, whose tireless coverage of Facebook and their oversight board made this story possible.
We'd also like to give special thanks to Julie O'Wonow, Tim Wu, Noah Feldman, Andrew Moran, Monica Baker, John Taylor, Jeff Gellman, and all the volunteers who spoke with us from the network against hate speech. Beautiful, Jan. That's great. All right.
Hi, this is Claire Sabri calling from Lafayette, California. Radio Lab is created by Jada Bemrod and is edited by Sean Mueller. Lulu Miller and Moches Nosser are co-hosts. Dylan Keep is our director of sound design.
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