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 “.” Meta initially removed the user’s post from Facebook under its Bullying and Harassment Community Standard, which prohibits “derogatory sexualized photoshop or drawings.” When the Board brought this case to Meta’s attention, the company determined that the removal of the content was incorrect, restoring the post to Facebook. Meta explained that its Community Standards were not violated in this case because the company does not consider that pinching a person’s nipple through their clothing qualifies as sexual activity.

Now, this would mostly be a non-story if McConnell hadn’t approached conservative-leaning outlets like the New York Post and [cough] Volokh Conspiracy to make sure “conservatives” knew how hard McConnell and his fellow board members were working to ensure their views weren’t “censored.”

Of course, this statement can’t be found directly on McConnell’s Hoover Institute page. Instead, he links to the articles quoting him at length. Eugene Volokh’s quotation of McConnell appears to contain the entirety of his self-congratulatory message. And it’s hilarious, although I have to assume McConnell released it with the intent of it being taken very seriously.

This is direct from the mouth of one of the people staffing Meta’s moderation Oversight Board — one who’s completely convinced social media services are biased against “conservatives.” But all he brings to the argument is his own bias, which is not only “conservative,” but entirely of the confirmational variety. Enjoy!

Conservatives in the United States have long complained that the social media companies discriminate against right-of-center speech. It is hard to know how systemic this problem might be, because there are no good data—but there certainly are disturbing examples. 

In the hands of a more rational person, the lack of good data would suggest more research is needed and that it would be irresponsible to draw conclusions from this lack of evidence.

But board member/guy who thinks he doing right by the Right McConnell has decided the lack of evidence proves something and that assumption will remain in place until when (but more likely, if) he’s able to find the data that supports his presuppositions.

Most of the rest of his statement explains why so few moderation complaints have been handled by the Oversight Board. And, again, McConnell presents presuppositions without the “good data” he needs to support these assertions.

First, he claims Meta does actually respond to complaints from supposedly “censored” conservatives.

[W]hen users point out obvious errors in taking down legitimate posts, Meta’s internal system often corrects the decision within a few days or a week.

But that’s not good enough for McConnell because it’s not fast enough.

A few days or a week is long enough to do the harm; speech on political issues is usually stale after that time has passed. But if errors are corrected in that time frame, the case will never come to the Oversight Board.

The problems are solved, but not quickly enough to make people (falsely) crying “censorship” happy. His other theory is that his fellow conservatives view protesting content moderation decisions as pointless, assuming (perhaps correctly in some cases) their particular complaints won’t be considered important enough to be handled in a timely fashion, if they’re ever handled at all.

Nonetheless, McConnell says the review board is a good thing (for “people of all political stripes,” even though he’s obviously notified his fellow conservatives of this effort first). It can take cases referred to it and handle them more quickly than Meta’s existing moderation team. Of course, the flip side of this is that the Oversight Board can pick and choose which complaints it wishes to handle. And if McConnell thinks this won’t result in more bias, rather than less, it’s only because he’s clearly willing to get high on his own supply.