The Facebook oversight board has received over 9,000 comments about former President Donald Trump’s case, which they are set to rule on by April.
Trump’s case has received nearly 100 times more comments than the oversight board’s last five cases combined, Facebook’s head of communications told Politico Thursday.
Facebook created the oversight board last year to help the company make decisions about how to moderate various content. The 40-member board has the power to make binding decisions about what content should be left up and what should be taken down.
After the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol building, Trump was banned or suspended from nearly all major social media platforms, including Facebook. The company imposed a temporary ban on the former president’s account on Jan. 7, and the oversight board is now tasked with deciding whether or not the ban should be permanent. (RELATED: Twitter Follows Trump Suspension With Massive ‘Purge’ Of Conservative Accounts)
#New: Facebook says it will refer its decision to indefinitely suspend former President Trump’s access to his Facebook and Instagram accounts to an independent Oversight Board.
They can’t be overruled by Mark Zuckerberg or anyone else at Facebook.
— scott budman (@scottbudman) January 21, 2021
“We believe our decision was necessary and right,” Facebook said in a Jan. 21 press release. “Given its significance, we think it is important for the board to review it and reach an independent judgment on whether it should be upheld.”
Facebook spokesperson Dex Hunter-Torricke said that for the oversight board’s initial five cases combined, they received just over 100 comments, Politico reported.
Trump’s case “is an order of magnitude greater,” Hunter-Torricke said during a virtual discussion held by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “There are all sorts of actors and ordinary folks who said this is something that I care about.”
The board recently extended the deadline for submissions on Trump’s case due to “high levels of interest,” according to the report. Friday is now the last day to submit comments.
“The number of comments in this particular case reflects [the] level of global interest in the case,” a spokesperson for the Oversight Board told the Daily Caller. “Public comments played a valuable role in informing the Board’s first decisions, and we’re grateful to everyone who has taken the time to share their perspectives on those cases as well as this one.”
The spokesperson said that once the official decision is published, comments from people who have given the board permission to share will be made public.
