When Donald Trump reemerged at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference to give his first public speech since leaving the White House, he made the animating focus of his post-presidency perfectly clear: he won the 2020 election, which was stolen from him. This lie, which led to the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol and still threatens American democracy, remains Trump’s burning obsession. We just haven’t heard him say it much over the past several weeks because the former president can no longer post to Twitter and Facebook.

Both social media companies took action to remove Trump after January 6’s riot, having determined he used their platforms to promote violence. Twitter made Trump’s ban permanent and purged his posting history. Facebook chose a different tack. It kept the former president’s Facebook and Instagram accounts up, but prohibited new posts—at least until its Oversight Board could weigh in. The company has asked the board, which began rendering decisions this year, to decide whether Facebook should keep Trump’s ban in place or to welcome him back to the world’s largest social media platform. It is a significant decision for the country, the company, and for the Oversight Board itself.

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Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham University law professor and Big Tech critic, used a succinct analogy to make a similar argument. “If Exxon hired a bunch of academics and thought leaders and paid them through a trust to occasionally tell them where not to drill, I would not say we’d figured out a mechanism for dealing with fossil fuel,” Teachout tweeted last month. Many others have expressed concerns that the board could emerge as a distraction from Facebook’s more fundamental failings.