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WALTER ISAACSON: And then Mark asked you to come up with some idea and you’ve come up with almost a “Supreme Court,” as you call it, for Facebook.
Explain to me how that happened and why it makes sense.
NOAH FELDMAN: Well, I think that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have realized for some time now that with so many users all over the world, you know, well over 2 billion users all over the world, that platform has become the place for a huge percentage of the speech that actually happens. You know, we communicate about politics on Facebook and in some countries, almost all political expression happens on Facebook. Not so much in the United States, but in other countries. We also communicate with our loved ones on Facebook. We discuss ideas. So it’s become a platform where a lot of speech happens. And it’s also a platform that requires some ground rules, some rules of the road for what speech will be permitted and what speech won’t be permitted. Partly because bad things can happen when the wrong kind of speech is allowed to to spread too quickly.
You think of the genocide in Myanmar, where lots and lots of the call for genocide was taking place on Facebook. And, you know, Facebook had to do something about that. And I think they would have liked to have done it faster. The whole world would have liked them to have done it faster. I think Mark had the sense that he, as the person with the who controls the shares that run Facebook, should not be the king of the world, should not be the person whose ultimate judgment decides the question of free expression. And he was, I think, thinking frequently about various ways that he might be able to devolve take away some of his own power. And my suggestion was, look, governments have dealt with this problem, too. Governments want to allow free expression, but they also know there have to be some limits and they don’t trust themselves to make a fresh decision every time using their legislature. And there’s a solution to that problem. And the solution is a court. A constitutional court. A body that can make independent decisions that will not be swayed by the politics of the moment. And it will stand up for the freedom of expression.
And I think the reason that that’s needed is that if you think about it, the people who everyone likes, free expression in the abstract. You almost never meet someone who says, “Yeah, free speech, I’m against it.” But in concrete cases where there’s a specific sentence or viewpoint or utterance that you hate, the natural thing to want to do is to urge Facebook to take it down, to lobby them, to take it down. So any company that’s a profit-making company is going to have a tendency to want to listen to the people who are saying take it down and having any given instance. So having an institution that’s independent to review Facebook decisions and make sure that they correspond to the value of free expression is ultimately a way of protecting free expression from these pressures.
And so I think that’s the way it’s supposed to work. And what this oversight board or Supreme Court will I think do is it will make the hard decisions by weighing competing value.
WALTER ISAACSON: Who’s going to be on it?
NOAH FELDMAN: Well, Facebook has said they want it to be a body with international representation. There’ll be Americans for sure. Facebook is an American-based company, but it’s also serving people over the world. There will be people from around the world.
WALTER ISAACSON: Will you have the same rules overseas as you will for America?
NOAH FELDMAN: So Facebook at present maintains a single unified standard for expression on its platform. And that has been historically an important thing from Facebook perspective. They want to be a global platform. And in fact, I think Facebook aspires to truly be a global community. It’s hard to be a global community with 2 2 billion plus people. That may be more of an aspiration to be reached for than something it’s always achieved. But I think if you don’t have standard rules, it’s really hard to be a global community.
WALTER ISAACSON: But why shouldn’t China say we want different rules in the United States?
NOAH FELDMAN: Well, first, I think it’s important to note that there are countries that China is an example of a country that doesn’t really have free speech at all. I mean, I’ll talk about that in a second. But there are countries that do have freedom of expression like Germany for. People that apply their rules a little differently than the U.S. does. And they have put pressure on Facebook, too, and other and on other servers to make sure that their national laws are obeyed. And, you know, within a certain bound, I can understand that. And it makes sense if a country says we don’t have freedom of expression at all, then it’s up to Facebook to decide whether it’s willing to allow and to serve users in those countries.
I think right now the general view from Facebook seems to be that in a country that genuinely doesn’t prohibit freedom of expression, there’s too much of a mismatch between the country’s values and Facebook’s value of free expression to try to run the business in conjunction with that kind of radical absence of free expression. That’s obviously a business judgment. But I think it’s a business judgment that also has an important ethical, ethical dimension.