Based on the findings, the paper argued, Facebook should focus less on punishing haters and more on creating a system of procedural justice that users could come to respect and trust. After all, Facebook’s government may be a deliberative body, but it’s by no means a democratic one. Last year, for the first time, the company began letting users file an appeal when Facebook removed their individual posts. But now Katsaros is gone. So is his co-author Sudhir Venkatesh, who has returned to his sociology post at Columbia University after a two-year stint at Facebook.

In late January, Facebook released a few more nuggets about the composition of its Supreme Court. The first iteration would likely feature 40 paid judges, serving on a part-time basis for three-year terms. The court would have the power to overrule Facebook’s content moderators, but not to rewrite the company’s Community Standards. Little was said about the role or rights of the individual users who would be bringing their appeals to the high court.

For now, the court is in Monika Bickert’s hands. At the conclusion of the session I attend, Bickert is piped in via video conference. Several judges comment that it would be a lot easier to resolve cases if they understood the motivations behind them. Bickert nods sympathetically. Facebook’s Supreme Court will be provided with plenty of context when it decides its cases. But there are only so many appeals it can hear. “The reality is, with billions of posts every day, and millions of reports from users every day,” Bickert says, “it’s just not something that we can operationalize at this scale.”

It was an outcome that Justice Louis Brandeis, the free-speech advocate, might have predicted. Brandeis was also an outspoken anti-monopolist, and Facebook’s critics often invoke him to justify breaking up the company. Even with an independent Supreme Court, it would seem, Facebook may be too big to succeed.

A couple weeks before the midterm elections, which Facebook is not accused of bungling, Bickert is playing a game. We are walking through a handsome Palo Alto neighborhood called Professorville, adjacent to Zuckerberg’s home neighborhood of Crescent Park. It’s almost Halloween, and I’ve never seen so many extravagantly creepy yard decorations in my life. Home after home, locked in a bourgeois arms race to rack up the most realistically undead ghouls and animatronic skeletons. Accompanying us is Ruchika Budhraja, my Facebook P.R. minder and one of Bickert’s close friends at the company. The game is: How much does that house cost?

The house we’re looking at is enormous: three stories tall, brownish with green trim, plus a wraparound veranda. Bickert appraises. “Hmmm,” she says. “Nine million.” I guess $8.25 million. Budhraja looks up the price on her phone. After a moment, the verdict. “It says four and a half,” she informs us.

What? That can’t be right. We’re standing in the middle of the most expensive real-estate market in the country. Bickert consults Zillow. “This says 12.9.” That’s more like it. Budhraja pleads no contest. “I just googled on the Internet,” she says. Bickert shakes her head. “Fake news.”

This is a chancy parlor game to be playing with a journalist. A tech executive, playfully quantifying how her industry has turned an entire metro area unaffordable. But in the moment, it doesn’t feel so tone-deaf. When Bickert marvels at the obscenity of Silicon Valley property values, you can tell it’s from a place of anthropological remove. This isn’t really her world. She may be at Facebook, but she isn’t of it.

Because she’s not a member of Facebook’s founding generation, she’s not defensive about the company’s shortcomings. And because she’s freed from delusions of tech-sector altruism, she isn’t precious about trying to make all of Facebook’s users happy. If the left wing of the Internet generally wants a safer and more sanitized Facebook, and the right wing wants a free-speech free-for-all, Bickert is clinging to an increasingly outmoded Obamian incrementalism. Lead from behind. Don’t do stupid shit. Anything more ambitious would be utopian.

“The world is too diverse,” she says. “And people see speech so differently, and safety so differently. I don’t think we’re ever going to craft the perfect set of policies where we’re like, ‘We’ve nailed it.’ I don’t think we ever will.”

And one more thing: You still can’t say, “Men are scum.”

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