Facebook’s ‘Supreme Court’ Tells Zuckerberg He’s the Decider

The company tried to punt its Trump dilemma to a panel of experts. On Wednesday, the experts punted back.

There’s a saying plastered on the walls of Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.: “Nothing at Facebook is somebody else’s problem.” It’s one of the social network’s bedrock principles — the idea that, instead of offloading hard challenges to others, Facebookers should roll up their sleeves and do it themselves. So it was a bit of poetic justice that on Wednesday, the Facebook Oversight Board — a newish panel of experts charged with ruling on some of the company’s hardest calls on content moderation — rejected the company’s attempt to outsource one of the thorniest tasks in its 17-year history: deciding what to do about former President Donald J. Trump.