Hungary’s conservative government has expressed concern over Facebook’s new Oversight Board, with the Prime Minister calling it a “Soros Oversight Board.”
The branding alludes to the Hungarian prime minister’s long-term target of criticism, billionaire George Soros, who has been consistently scrutinizing many government policies.
According to the Hungarian government, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has given in to the demands of Soros by establishing a high-powered appeals board that decides whose content gets to remain on the platform:
“[On] January 31, Soros penned an op-ed in theNew York Times under a quote: ‘Mark Zuckerberg Should Not Be in Control of Facebook.’ That alone takes cheeks, but that was nothing. Following the argument that Facebook supports Trump ‘because it’s good for business’ — and some conspiracy theory about what really took place during the meeting between the Facebook CEO and the US president — Soros then went on to say ‘Facebook is a publisher not just a neutral moderator or ‘platform’ and ‘should be held accountable for the content that appears on its site,'” wrote Zoltán Kovács, the Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy.
“Little more than three months later, Facebook announced it has created an Oversight Board to help decide what content stays for viewing and what content will be removed from the world’s largest social media site – and it appears to be packed with liberals, including more than one with direct ties to Soros himself.”
One of the Oversight Board members, Alan Rusbridger, a former editor of the left-wing newspaper The Guardian, has called for President Trump’s press conferences to be censored for “spreading disinformation.”
Further concerns were raised over another member of the Oversight Board, Helle Throning-Schmidt, who is a former Prime Minister of Denmark for the left-wing Social Democrat party.
Other tweets and rants from several of the other Oversight Board members include:
- Professor Pamela S. Karlan who infamously made President Trump’s son Barron the butt of a joke during the impeachment hearing and also worked in the civil rights division of President Obama’s Justice Department
- Lawyer and activist Nighat Dad who tweeted: “God forbid if Trump becomes the president, this will be my last visit to US”
- Dwight Professor of Law at Columbia Law School Jamal Greene who accused President Trump of aligning himself with “toadies and criminals”
Kovacs questions as to how was it possible that Soros, who is a private citizen, could have influenced the selection of people who are supposed to serve as the world’s top social networking platform’s oversight committee.
Ironically, Soros recently reaffirms his accusation against Facebook under the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. According to him, the two only follow one guiding principle and that is to maximize profits irrespective of the consequences. Thus these two should not be left in control of Facebook, says Soros.
