Facebook controls as much as 80% of social
media traffic. That means that it has the
power to erase conversations, shift
narratives, and control how people speak to
one another.
With 190 million
users in the United States, the social
network monopoly has more control over what
people see than all of the media giants
combined do. And now Facebook is putting
some very troubling political activists in
charge of its Oversight Board who will
decide how it censors.
“You can imagine some sort of structure,
almost like a Supreme Court, that is made up
of independent folks who don’t work for
Facebook, who ultimately make the final
judgment call on what should be acceptable
speech in a community that reflects the
social norms and values of people all around
the world,” Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg
had described the Board.
What does Facebook’s Supreme Court of
Censorship look like when you zoom in?
Only a quarter of the Oversight Board
originates from the United States. That
means three quarters of the censorship court
comes from countries with no First
Amendment. While people from outside the
United States may believe in certain kinds
of free speech, political speech in this
country will be determined by a majority
Third World board of left-leaning political
activists.
And even there the balance is curiously
tilted.
3 members of the 20 member board are Muslim
or come from Muslim countries. Only one
board member is Hindu. Considering that
there are approximately 1.1 billion Hindus
and 1.8 billion Muslims, the Facebook
Oversight Board favors Muslim countries at
the expense of Hindus.
Considering the pressure by Islamists and
their allies to censor India’s Hindu
political movements and civil rights
organizations combating Islamic violence,
this is troubling.
The Oversight Board also has only one Asian
member for around 1.8 billion people.
Of the 3 Muslim nationals, Kyle Shideler of
the Center for Security Policy
has
noted that Tawakkol Karman was a top
leader in a Muslim Brotherhood linked group
with ties to Al Qaeda.
“The Brotherhood is a movement fighting for
freedom," Karman wrote of the organization
whose leaders have called for the murder of
Jews and whose history includes Nazi
collaboration.
“Because it is an integral part of this
region, the Brotherhood is the one who will
rule Riyadh and Abu Dhabi," she even
predicted.
Facebook has added an Islamist who believes
that a theocracy will rule the region, and
put her in charge of determining content
moderation policies for the entire planet. A
member aligned with a violently bigoted
organization will help Facebook police “hate
speech”.
What will happen to ex-Muslims and secular
activists in Muslim countries under this
setup?
These numbers make it clear that the Board
is not proportional by population, and
despite its international makeup, reflects
the political agendas of Facebook’s
left-leaning leadership.
The first member, in alphabetical order, is
a program manager at the Open Society
Initiative, a part of the George Soros
global political empire of NGOs. There is no
indication that the Soros employee will be
stepping down from her role so that, despite
previous clashes with the radical
billionaire, George Soros will effectively
control a seat on Facebook’s Oversight
Board.
At least.
Andras Sajo has held positions in Open
Society organizations, including on the
Board of Directors of the Open Society
Justice Initiative and is allegedly an old
friend of Soros.
Helle Thorning-Schmidt sits on the Board of
Trustees of Soros' International Crisis
Group along with the extremist billionaire
and his son.
Maina Kiai sits on the Advisory Board for
the Human Rights Initiative of Soros' Open
Society Foundations.
Sudhir Krishnaswamy also
appears to
have benefited from an Open Society grant.
This is not unusual considering that the
Oversight Board is weighed heavily toward
NGOs with members from Human Rights Watch
and Amnesty International. Even dismissing
members who have only appeared at Soros
events or made use of grants from Soros
organizations, four Oversight Board members
are deeply involved in Soros organizations.
And Soros has made his hostility to free
speech, and his conviction that
conservatives must be censored, abundantly
clear.
Soros has demanded that Facebook "should be
held accountable for the content that
appears on its site" and complained that the
company "fails to adequately punish those
who spread false information.” Will
Oversight Board members who work for Soros
or sit on the boards of his organizations
protect free speech or support the
billionaire’s crusade to censor the
opposition?
If the Oversight Board is going to be the
final determinative body for Facebook
censorship, why stack it with so many
professional human rights activists who are
not lawyers or professors? Courts don’t
invite in activists to issue rulings. That’s
because activists come with agendas. And
their agendas may involve empowerment, but
usually for a small and narrowly defined
group.
They are also rarely independent, but often
funded by billionaires with their own
agendas.
But even the Oversight Board’s academic
members can be as repressive as a Soros.
Nicolas Suzor had written that "neutrality"
on social media platforms is "causing
problems" and that "neutral tools that do
not actively take inequality into account
will almost inevitably contribute to the
amplification of inequality." He even
suggested that dissent from the Left's
global warming positions could also be
viewed as dangerous. "Racism, misogyny, and
bigotry, anti-vaccination content,
misinformation, self-harm, and climate
change denial — all require difficult
judgments about when one person’s speech is
harmful to others."
In a Twitter exchange, a prof argued that,
"many of the most controversial content
moderation decisions are about leave-ups.
Think: Pelosi video, hate speech in Myanmar,
Alex Jones... not having this in scope for
the Board from the start is a huge…
Oversight." Suzor
replied
that, "totally agree that expanding the
scope as soon as we can is really
important."
That should worry anyone whose speech might
one day fall afoul of the Soroses and
Suzors.
Dubious claims that some form of speech is
dangerous have been used to justify
crackdowns by social media giants on
everything from pro-life views to support
for conservative candidates. The current
wave of censorship has been justified by
insisting that conservative speech is either
a product of foreign disinformation (the
Russia hoax), that it’s medically dangerous
(suppression of political protests, dissent
on coronavirus policy, or opposition to
abortion), or that any speech offensive to
an identity politics group causes inequality
and psychological harm.
Combine the three together and they add up
to censoring any political speech the Left
opposes.
And, as Michael Moore’s censorship by
environmentalists shows, not even career
leftists are immune from the Orwellian
political orthodoxy that brands some views
anathema overnight.
(That is why leftists might want to
reconsider their abandonment of liberalism
before it’s too late. History shows that the
ideology most likely to purge lefties for
ideological dissent is the Left.)
Facebook set up the Oversight Board to
outsource its censorship while evading
responsibility for its repression. The dot
com giant wants to be a monopoly that has a
stranglehold on the marketplace of ideas,
but it doesn’t want to be open to the
marketplace’s diversity of ideas.
That is the totalitarian fallacy of most of
the Big Tech giants who want users on their
terms.
Stacking the board with Soros cronies and
assorted human rights activists, digital
experts, and the other sorts of people who
spend all their time appearing on panels and
giving TED talks, is how Big Tech companies
have their censorship cake and eat it too.
After this, when conservatives complain
about Facebook censorship, it won’t be Mark
Zuckerberg’s fault.
But it will be.
The Oversight Board, like most Facebook
initiatives, is rigged from the ground up.
It contains a few token libertarians, but is
tilted toward lefties. It contains an
Islamist, but hardly anyone likely to
advocate for the values of traditional
Christians and Jews. Behind the facade of
international diversity, the Supreme Court
of Censorship has very little intellectual
or religious diversity.
Two libertarian/conservative establishment
figures don’t balance out eight lefties just
as bringing in an Israeli leftist does not
balance out a Yemeni Muslim Brotherhood
figure. Giving Soros four seats and Koch one
is not only rigging the game, but failing to
address the real issues at stake.
The social media giant is responding to
pressure to censor conservative views,
especially in the US, the UK, Israel, Latin
America, Myanmar, and India, yet has no
representatives of the sorts of people who
are likely to be censored. Instead it
stacked the deck with those likely to
censor.
Where are the Trump supporters, the Modi
backers, the Bolsonaro fans, the Zionists,
the Buddhist monks of Myanmar, or any group
that dissents from the Left on any major
issue?
Of the groups likely to be censored, only
the Islamists get their own representative
at Facebook.
The Supreme Court of Censorship is rigged in
favor of the censors and against the
censored.
Facebook has assembled a grab bag of
globalist personalities that wouldn’t be out
of place at a UN conference (and a number
have worked at or for the UN in some
capacity) and put them in charge of
determining what can be said by billions of
people around the world.
And by countless millions in the United
States of America.
The United States is tasked with protecting
the essential freedoms of its citizens from
interference by its government, by foreign
governments, or by any force so powerful
that it can singly blot out any of the Bill
of Rights. The Big Tech monopolies like
Google, Amazon, and Facebook pose a unique
threat to the unalienable rights among which
are, "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness", for whose protection,
"Governments are instituted among Men."
This is the role that Jefferson envisioned
for government in the Declaration of
Independence.
Governments wield power by the “consent of
the governed” who can vote and remove any
government. Facebook would like us to think
that its powers to censor will derive from a
bunch of globalist NGO activists and lefty
law professors. No individual or group has
the power to stop Facebook’s monopoly over
social media. It has become too rich and
powerful.
Only our government can fulfill its role by
restoring our freedom to speak and be heard.
Otherwise all
political speech that is not of the Left
will be erased from the public square. If
there were any doubt about that, Facebook’s
Supreme Court of Censorship has settled it.
Thank you for reading.