Since the detailed and ambivalent account of the FOB that @klonick recently published in @NewYorker is generating so much discussion, I thought it might be useful to place the FOB in a broader historical trajectory: what is new here and what isn’t? h/t @rickhills 1/15

First, most obvious pt: we have dealt with similar problems before! We tend to regard the FB prob--a private corp controlling the mass public sphere—as unprecedented, but that is just not the case. At the Founding, the fed gov was primary regulator of the mass public. 2/15

But ever since the fed gov decided in 1850s to not create a public telegraph—a decision that shocked many, including its inventor, Robert Morse, who thought only a dem gov should have this power—private corps have played a crucial role in regulating our public sphere. 3/15

FB is NOT the first corp that has had to act as a private speech police. This is not even the 1st time a corp has created an advisory board to give its speech decisions more legitimacy and thereby stave off unfriendly regulation (what I take to be the FOB's goals). 4/15

In the 1920s, the media behemoth of that age, NBC, created its own Advisory Council to develop speech rules for the many radio stations it controlled. Like the FOB, the Advisory Council was stocked with prominent people—John W. Davis, solicitor general of the US . . . 5/15