Thread by @ezraklein

Facebook's Oversight Board seems to me like an attempt to solve the problem of legitimacy without solving the problems of representation and voice.

But representation and voice are what give governmental decisions broad legitimacy!

This is hard to do well even in democratic systems, and our system, for instance, is constantly at war with itself over whether it really is representative (it isn't), and why some voices carry so much further than others.

But Zuckerberg is still the ultimate power at Facebook. The Board is still a Facebook creation. I take seriously that they take it seriously, and it may be an interesting model to insulate corporate decisionmaking from certain pressures.

But it's not going to make those decisions more legitimate unless the public has more voice and representation.

It might make them less legitimate! Zuckerberg is at least a public figure who can be lobbied, while the Board abstracts and disperses authority in confusing ways.

I could think of interesting experiments to try here, like letting the public vote on cases the Board takes, but it's also easy to see how those can go wrong.

That gets to the core conflict: Governments make *a lot* of clumsy trade-offs to achieve legitimacy.

Facebook, a private company, doesn't want to make those tradeoffs. Zuckerberg wants to run it as a fast-growing company, not a slow-moving government.

I give Facebook credit for trying to figure out how to govern itself better, but I'm not sure there's an answer here. Facebook has more power than a private company should have. Governments can take that power or size from them, or not, but Facebook can't answer this.