‘Anti-Trump progressives’: Facebook facing pushback over members of new oversight board

One notable member is former editor in chief of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, who has expressed his dislike of President Trump and garnered pushback from Conservative politicians in the United Kingdom. Rusbridger tweeted in 2017, “How an obstruction of justice case may be shaping up against Trump,” concerning special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the president.

Following his appointment to the board, the Telegraph ran the headline “Facebook accused of left-wing bias after appointing ex-Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger to ‘supreme court’” on Monday, quoting Conservative members of parliament outraged at the announcement.

Damian Green, a Conservative MP, said the board fails “miserably to provide confidence in its political balance.”

“Globally, Facebook is much more important than any newspaper or broadcaster, so it has a consequent responsibility to demonstrate it is open to a range of views,” he added.

Andrew Bridgen, a Conservative MP for North West Leicestershire, also issued a warning about the announcement, saying, “It’s not only bad practice, it’s also bad business and risks alienating the majority of their customer base.”

The idea of the oversight board came from Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, who told Fast Company in 2019, “I dreamt up the idea of a ‘Facebook Supreme Court’ at the end of January 2018, and I sent a one-pager [describing it] to Sheryl Sandberg, who said, ‘Let me send it to [Mark Zuckerberg].’”

“Mark was intrigued,” he continued. “I talked to him, and then after our conversation, he said, ‘Listen, why don’t you write a white paper for us laying this out in greater length?’ So then I produced this 20-page paper [and] sent that to them in March of 2018. So that was the initial vision for the thing. And then subsequently, as they decided they wanted to actually go forward with it, I was hired on as an adviser, and I’ve been advising them all the way through.”

The board also includes members such as Helle Thorning-Schmidt, former prime minister of Denmark for the left-wing Social Democrat party, Afia Asantewaa Asare-Kyei, who is a member of George Soros’s Open Society Initiative, University of Oklahoma law professor Evelyn Aswad, who worked on Hillary Clinton’s Istanbul Process when she was secretary of state, and Pamela Karlan, who worked in the Justice Department under the Obama administration and was described by the New York Times as a “Legal Leader Committed to Progressive Causes.”

Others who were picked include Michael McConnell, who was a former federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush, Tawakkol Karman, who was the first Arab woman to win a Nobel Prize, and John Samples, vice president of the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute.

“We stand completely behind this selection,” Thorning-Schmidt said Wednesday.

The announcement, however, has received pushback from some on Twitter, including Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley.

“This is how powerful @Facebook is, how much speech it controls, how much of our time & attention it claims: it now has a special censorship committee to decide what speech can stay & what should go. Facebook basically making the case it should be broken up,” Hawley said.

Others on Twitter, including conservative commentator Mark Levin, also took issue with some of the members. Levin tweeted, “Facebook censorship set in place with anti-Trump progressives, 6-months before the general election.”

Facebook noted in the announcement, “The work of the Board is commencing immediately, and we are on track to begin hearing cases in the coming months. We are still assessing how the global response to the coronavirus pandemic may impact important steps required for the Board to reach full operational capability, including recruiting staff, training Members and implementing tools essential to ensuring data privacy and security.”