Did you know that freedom of expression isn’t really a civil right? Me neither!
But that’s the conclusion of an independent audit of Facebook that the consumer data-mining company (ahem) commissioned a group of “civil rights” lawyers to produce.
The report was published Wednesday after it was initiated two years ago. Its introduction tells you everything you need to know about how it came to the conclusions that it did: “We interviewed and solicited input from over 100 civil rights and social justice organizations, hundreds of advocates and several members of Congress.”
Anytime you see the words “social” and “justice” put together, you know you’re not really talking about justice. Rather, you’re going to get a dog’s breakfast filled with garbage statements like this: “The prioritization of free expression over all other values, such as equality and non-discrimination, is deeply troubling.”
The report repeatedly suggests that free speech on the platform represents a threat to the rights of others, minorities in particular.
But what the lawyers who conducted the investigation really took exception with were statements posted on Facebook by President Trump earlier this year.
You saw that coming — I know.
“Facebook’s failure to remove the Trump voting-related posts and close [political misinformation] enforcement gaps seems to reflect a statement of values that protecting free expression is more important than other stated company values,” the report said.
At issue were things Trump had said about voter fraud committed with mail-in ballots, which he claims is vast. (The White House website has published a Heritage Foundation analysis that identified 1,088 “proven instances of voter fraud” between 1982 and 2020.)
Facebook prohibits content that could potentially suppress voters, a laughably vague concept, but it also has said it will not police the speech of elected officials given such content’s news value.
The audit on Facebook pretends that the problem then becomes a tiered system on free speech and who gets more of it, but that’s not really what the lawyers are getting at.
What they want is for Facebook to be a moral crusader and settle issues of what kind of speech is acceptable in public, especially with regard to national politics. That’s why “white nationalism” and “white supremacy” are explicitly singled out as trouble zones for Facebook to address, yet there’s not a word about Islamic extremism — which, yes, is a recurring problem with Facebook.
The report isn’t a “civil rights audit” in any serious sense. It’s a political document pressuring Facebook to become a vessel for the social justice freaks in the Democratic Party.
