Facebook’s ‘independent’ board stocked with Trump haters
What do you get if you cross a former Danish prime minister, someone who once edited the left-wing Guardian newspaper, a Yemini activist, a bunch of law professors and a Pakistani digital rights advocate? The predictable banning of Donald Trump.
Those are just some of the members of the Facebook Oversight Board, a kind of social media Supreme Court, one the left has already packed. Yesterday, the group extended the banning of Trump from Facebook for six months, urging the company to come up with guidelines that would extend his censoring. Considering how central Facebook can be to political fundraising and outreach, not to mention news, exiling Trump is no small matter. It is meddling with democracy.
Facebook suggests this 20-member group is “independent,” but that’s a farce.
A cursory glance at the board members shows how the fix was in against Trump from the start:
- Co-chair Jamal Greene, a Columbia law professor, has tweeted, “The transparency of Trump’s unfitness means, almost tautologically, that a big chunk of his supporters are conspiracy-minded.”
- Nighat Dad, a lawyer and “internet activist” in Pakistan, had this to say: “Mr Trump FYI Pakistan is soon going to enact Transgender Protection Act 2017. Sorry America sad to see what kind of country you have become.”
- Alan Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief of the Guardian who is for some reason on the board, tweeted, “This is terrifying” when Trump said he would decide when the nation reopens from COVID-19 lockdowns.
- Nicolas Suzor, a Queensland University of Technology law professor in Australia, praised an article comparing Trump to a certain Nazi leader, writing: “I love this! ‘Teen Vogue vs Trump; American Vogue vs Hitler’ ”
- Afia Asantewaa Asare-Kyei, a human rights lawyer from Ghana and South Africa, who criticized Trump’s immigration policies. The group she was a part of, Open Society Foundation, once tweeted at Trump: “We support the right to protest, enshrined in the 1st Amendment, and are shocked a sitting president does not share the Founders’ view.”
- The closest the board seems to get to a conservative is Stanford law professor Michael McConnell, whom John McCain and Mitt Romney might have made a Supreme Court justice had they been elected, and John Samples, vice president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. Neither is a full-throated, unapologetic or conservative torchbearer. In fact, Samples appeared on a podcast called “Trump’s Assault On America’s Institutions.”
- Not involved in the Trump decision was Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan, but that’s only because she recently stepped down — to join the Biden administration as principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division.
This is just a sample, but considering that many of the other board members are “activists” or law professors, it’s doubtful any of them owns a MAGA hat.
This was Trump’s jury, not a jury of peers but a jury of jeers.
The reason this all matters, of course, is that a third of Americans get their news from Facebook. The platform is so ubiquitous that for many people, it’s the only way they connect with their families and friends.
Allowing a far-left-leaning, international commission to decide if a former president can reach those Americans is absurd and dangerous.
The bottom line is that an overwhelmingly progressive group of experts has decided that Trump, who received 74 million votes for president, is too dangerous to be allowed on the world’s most important platform. No corporation in our country should have that much power to silence political speech, certainly not one that can’t even put together a fair or balanced oversight board.
Every day Republicans are more ready to rein in the social media giant. Facebook may object, but hey, at least those lawmakers are elected.
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