Public whistleblowers typically depend upon journalists and reporters to take an interest in their story. But help from responsible and committed media professionals is elusive. Even when available, media support is challenging to manage. When whistleblowers speak to the press, it is usually necessary that they be the ‘human face’ of the story; there is no opting out of the spotlight in the battle for credibility. This brings further attention and stress. Journalists can have different agendas to the whistleblowers with whom they work. Some care for their sources, conscious of the challenges of speaking in public. Others do not. The exemplar case of Frances Haugen at Facebook is invaluable in how she planned and executed her disclosure, leading to international scrutiny of her firm’s practices and changes to laws across the globe.

This chapter examines the design and performance of the most prominent recent innovation in platform governance, the Facebook (now Meta) Oversight Board. It contextualizes the examination of that board in the rule of law ideas of the preceding chapter. In the course of this analysis, it also develops some ideas about the normative function of platform legalism in building a kind of hybrid corporate/userbase platform identity which may be morally valuable as well as tactically valuable in resolving controversial governance issues. Finally, it suggests that the Oversight Board's handling of the "great deplatforming" of Donald Trump illustrates the capacity of lawlike modes of the decision to shape such an identity. It also serves as a counterexample to some of Carl Schmitt's ideas about sovereignty and emergency power.