After being haunted with countless allegations of censoring conservative content across its platform, Facebook finally ended up setting up an “Oversight Board”, colloquially known as the “Facebook Supreme Court” to ensure that there is a balanced political discourse on the platform.
Based on what a coalition of 60 conservative organizations and publishers say though, it is revealed that Facebook’s attempt seems like it’s going to be anything but a success.
Simply put, Facebook’s “Oversight Board” is the ultimate court of the platform that has the authority to overrule and control speech on the platform. But based on what the coalition, led by L. Brent Brozell III, the founder of Media Research Center and several other conservative figures said, the “Oversight Board” members list shows incredible bias.
According to the Free Speech Alliance, they say Facebook’s board mostly comprises prominent left-wingers and progressive figures such as the former editor-in-chief of The Guardian, a left-wing academic, pro-abortion activists, and several anti-Trump individuals.
“Conservatives warned from the start that any oversight mechanism was fraught with danger. Our fears were well founded. This new board will damage Facebook more than it can imagine.”
Furthermore, the coalition of conservatives that included Media Research Center, ACT for America, and the Eagle Forum, among others, in a combined statement, also pointed out that Facebook’s oversight was too “international”, restricting it from fully considering and accounting for the country’s free speech rights and First Amendment when making any critical judgments.
“We had cautioned that the oversight would be too international and unable or unwilling to embrace America’s First Amendment ideals of free speech, while embracing an internationalist construct pleasing to the radical left and likely to make Facebook’s restrictive content policies even worse”.
Furthermore, the statement said that the oversight board, with four co-chairs, only had one conservative and three leftists, making it unbalanced. The only conservative among the co-chair is Prof. Michael McConnell, a professor from Stanford’s law school.
“And that’s precisely what the company delivered. The new Oversight Board announced itself with a New York Times op-ed from the four co-chairs. Only one of the four, Stanford Law School Prof. Michael McConnell, is at all conservative. And not as strong as many would like.”
On a concluding note, the statement asked Facebook to either recruit more conservatives on its board or simply scrap the whole program altogether. All-in-all, the statement simply said that the new oversight board is too leftist-dominated to take any stern action against conservative censorship on the platform.
“When you announce your next 20 members, ensure that they will balance out the aggressively leftist tilt of this new venture your company has taken. Better yet: Get rid of the whole thing,” the letter ends.
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