While its sister sites shuffled through owners and staff revolts over the past half-decade, Gawker was viewed as a poisoned asset the result of both its late-in-life legal problems and its reputation in more staid quarters as a violator of journalistic norms. (I always liked Hamilton Nolan’s take: “Most journalism jobs exist on a continuum between audience and freedom. If you want a lot of people to pay attention to you, you work at a place where the individual writer’s voice is completely subsumed into the institutional voice. If you want complete freedom to write whatever the hell you want, you write on your personal Tumblr, where the whole world will ignore you. Gawker was one of the few places ever to exist that offered both a large, steady audience and almost complete freedom.”)2
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For Facebook, the conclusion of President Trump’s term in office meant a respite from the regular provocations of a leader who seemed intent on pushing the limits of what social media companies would allow.
It also brought one final dilemma: whether to reinstate his account,
locked down indefinitely in the aftermath of
But Facebook didn’t decide. Instead, the company punted the question to
a third-party organization convened last year explicitly to take such thorny questions off Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s shoulders.
“Facebook is referring its decision to indefinitely suspend former U.S. President Donald Trump’s access to his Facebook and Instagram accounts to the independent Oversight Board,”