What a speech controversy at Stanford tells us about Facebooks Oversight Board

Let’s conclude what turned out to be Free Speech Week on The Interface with a look at a case involving the co-chairman of Facebook’s new Oversight Board, a Zoom recording of his law school class, and the N-word.

Can you use a racist slur on Facebook? The answer is probably not, but also maybe. The company’s community standards prohibit “direct attacks” on people based on their race. But the company also published a blog post in 2017 laying out some of the nuances involved in deciding whether a slur is, in fact, an attack, which often depends heavily on context that goes beyond the written word.

Later this year, some of the hardest decisions about whether a post should stay up on Facebook will be made by an independent Oversight Board....

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