Nate Persily at The Monkey Cage:

The most important aspect of the board’s adjudication of the Trump takedown was its reliance on international human rights law to guide its decision. The board’s earlier decisions also referred to applicable United Nations Conventions and treaties,as does the charter that established the board in the first place. In many respects, the Oversight Board is a first step toward realizing human rights’ defenders long-standing dream of a world court with transnational jurisdiction.

However, it’s hard for Facebook to implement human rights principles that were designed to bind governments, rather than to guide a private company trying to moderate content. Facebook is not a government; its news feed, which uses algorithms to deliver personalized content to billions of people, is not the public square. Facebook is in the business of what constitutional lawyers call “prior restraints” — that is, filtering speech before it reaches its audience. Its rules on hate speech, obscenity, self-harm and disinformation, to name a few, would all be unconstitutional under the First Amendment if passed by the U.S. government.