What the United Nations Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights (Don’t) Say about Content Moderation

In 2020, one of the Facebook Oversight Board’s first cases dealt with Facebook’s decision to delete a post alleging that a cure for COVID-19 existed. The board decided that Facebook ought to reinstate the comment because its deletion was an unproportional measure under the test set forth in Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to evaluate restrictions on freedom of expression. This is just one example of how the board uses international human rights law (IHRL) as its own framework to justify all of its decisions. This framework conveys the message that the board’s members are not merely an editorial board issuing decisions and recommendations based on their normative taste. Instead, the board presents itself as an executor of the global public interest, purportedly embedded in international law. Just like courts articulate their policy preferences as legal reasoning, the board tries to persuade us that its decisions are an application of exogenous principles with global legitimacy.

But are the Oversight Board’s decisions really an objective application of widely acce

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