On Thursday, Media Research Center President Brent Bozell and the members of the Free Speech Alliance (FSA) released a statement expressing deep concerns on Facebook’s new Oversight Board.
Here is the statement in full:
While leftist organizations savaged him, we supported CEO Mark Zuckerberg when he talked about making Facebook a marketplace of ideas and spoke forcefully saying the company “must continue to stand for free expression.”
Yet leftist forces within and outside of Facebook have condemned him for this, agitating for the company to become an arbiter of what is, and isn’t truth; and therefore what should and should not be presented on Facebook. Facebook wants the public to believe that its new Oversight Board will help solve the problems “about what content to take down or leave up.”
Conservatives warned from the start that any new oversight mechanism was fraught with danger. Our fears were well founded. This new board will damage Facebook more than it can imagine.
We had cautioned that the oversight would be too international and unable or unwilling to embrace America’s 1st 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.
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.
The other three are reliably liberal. Columbia Law Prof. Jamal Greene was an aide to Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. Catalina Botero-Marino is the dean of the Universidad de los Andes Faculty of Law of Colombia. She is also a member of the board of directors of the Center for Reproductive Rights, a pro-abortion group. That is especially infuriating to pro-life groups that are regularly targeted on social media for their beliefs. No pro-life leader need apply to this board.
Then there’s the former prime minister of Denmark, Helle Thorning-Schmidt. She declared she “does not believe in eternal life, salvation or heaven and hell,” according to the publication Kristligt Dagblad.
Thorning-Schmidt is also one of at least six of the 15 international members of the board who openly espouse anti-Trump sentiments. She posted recently on Twitter over a photo of Obama endorsing presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden: “The endorsement!! OMG, Miss the voice of decency and grace.”
The board members picked by the co-chairs are as left-wing as you might expect. Former Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger has gone from supporting a free press to endorsing censorship. He tweeted in late March that the press should shut down President Donald Trump’s press conferences. “Completely agree that media should stop live broadcasting Trump, especially since he rejects robust challenges from reporters.” This is Facebook’s new commitment to free speech.
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Tawakkol Karman explained in an interview with the Spanish daily El Pais that she did “not trust Trump because I do not trust racist people.”
We find no one supportive of Trump.
It’s not just what the members oppose that is the problem. It’s what, and who, they support. At least three members have ties to leftist billionaire George Soros. One works directly for his Open Society organizations. Another was the founding dean at Central European University, which Soros founded and funded with nearly $1 billion. Even Oversight Board Executive Director Thomas Hughes comes from Article 19, which has received more than $2 million from Soros.
Some might argue that the right and Soros could find common ground supporting free speech. That’s not likely since Soros funds the very groups in the U.S. that are committed to banning conservatives from the open marketplace of ideas by branding them “haters” and the like. There are many wealthy donors on the right who also espouse free speech. Why aren’t they equally represented? One can only imagine how loudly the left would scream if three board members had ties to prominent conservative funders.
Sadly, Soros has far more influence with that board than the entire American right who are represented by one traditional conservative and one libertarian. Instead of supporting one another on rulings involving key social issues, they would likely cancel each other out.
It is too early to tell how such this board would rule. But it is terrifying to imagine how a powerful, leftist group like this might view and control conservative speech — speech that defends free enterprise, traditional marriage, religious freedom, the lives of the unborn, free speech and gun rights, to name but a few.
The answer in social media has often been to call such beliefs “hate speech,” the club the left has used to beat their opponents into submission on college campuses and online. And it has been a code word for anti-conservative censors like the Southern Poverty Law Center to shut down speech it doesn’t like.
The op-ed by the four co-chairs conveniently mentioned some form of the term “hate” three separate times.
That’s not just scary, it’s dangerous. The board is dominated not by believers in the U.S. Constitution and its protections of rights; it is controlled overwhelmingly by members who live in nations in opposition to such protections. The global view of rights — even in countries we consider strong allies like the U.K. or Australia — is as far away from American beliefs as they are geographically.
It is Orwellian. The international left is not open to free speech; it is intolerant of it. It has proclaimed that “climate change” is “settled science,” therefore any challenge based on science is untrue. The gay lifestyle is a moral right. Any challenge to it is an assault on the “dignity of man,” and therefore constitutes hate speech. Abortion “rights” are sacred; therefore the rights of the unborn are non-existent, and therefore their advocates are disingenuous. On and on it goes.
We believe Mark Zuckerberg was and continues to be committed to the free marketplace of ideas with Facebook as a platform and not a publisher. But Facebook has created yet another layer of control over that market, now dominated almost exclusively by non-American leftists.
Unlike its Silicon Valley cousins, Facebook has made a good faith effort to reach out to conservatives for their opinion, and we recognize that.
And so we offer this opinion of the proposed Oversight Board: 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.
Members of the Free Speech Alliance (FSA) include:
- L. Brent Bozell III
Founder and President
Media Research Center
- Saulius Anuzis
President
60 Plus Association
- Brigitte Gabriel
President
ACT for America
- Lori Roman
President
American Civil Rights Union
- Phil Kerpen
President
American Commitment
- Tim Wildmon
President
American Family Association
- Terry Schilling
Executive Director
American Principles Project
- R. Emmett Tyrrell
Founder and Editor-In-Chief
American Spectator
- Mark Fitzgibbons
President of Corporate Affairs
American Target Advertising
- Gary Bauer
President
American Values
- Richard Manning
President
Americans for Limited Government
- Tricia Erickson
President
Angel Pictures & Publicity
- Bill Donohue
President
Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights
- Jeff Hunt
Director
Centennial Institute
- Austin Ruse
President
Center for Family and Human Rights
- Elaine Donnelly
Founder and President
Center for Military Readiness
- Frank Gaffney
President
Center for Security Policy
- John Hinderaker
President
Center of the American Experiment
- Robert Allman
News Director
Christian Broadcasting Network
- Theodore Baehr
Publisher, Founder
Christian Film & Television Commission
- David Bossie
President and Chairman
Citizens United
- Michelle Easton
Board President
Clare Boothe Luce Center for Conservative Women
MRCTV is a division of the Media Research Center.
- Ryan Williams
President
Claremont Institute
- Penny Nance
President
Concerned Women for America
- Allen West
Senior Fellow
Media Research Fellow
- George Rasley
Managing Editor
Conservative HQ
- Ed Corrigan
Executive Director
Conservative Partnership Institute
- James Nolan
President
Crossroads Pro-Life Walks Across America
- Eunie Smith
President
Eagle Forum
- Sharon Slater
President and Founder
Family Watch International
- Christie Lee McNally
President
Raven Strategies
- Adam Brandon
President and CEO
FreedomWorks
- Will Chamberlain
Editor-in-Chief and Publisher
Human Events
- Carrie Lukas
President
Independent Women's Forum
- Charles Copeland
President
Intercollegiate Studies Institute
- Mat Staver
Founder and Chairman
Liberty Counsel
- John-Henry Westen
Editor-in-Chief, Co-Founder
Life Site News
- Steven Ertelt
Editor
LifeNews.com
- Kassy Dillon
Founder and President
Lone Conservative
- Gene Mills
President
Louisiana Family Forum
- Justin Danhof
General Counsel
National Center for Public Policy Research
- Brian Brown
President
National Organization for Marriage
- Gavin Wax
Editor in Chief
The Spiel
- Kevin Freeman
Founder and Chairman
NSIC Institute
- Craig Strazzeri
Chief Marketing Officer
PragerU
- James O'Keefe
President
Project Veritas
- Tom Spence
President and Publisher
Regnery Publishing
- Craig Shirley
Founder, Chairman & CEO
Shirley & Banister
- Kristan Hawkins
President
Students for Life
- Marjorie Dannenfelser
President
Susan B. Anthony List
- Jenny Beth Martin
Chairman
Tea Party Patriots, Inc.
- C. Preston Noell III
President
The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property
- Jim Lakely
Vice President and Director of Communications
The Heartland Institute
- Morton Blackwell
President
The Leadership Institute
- Rod Martin
Founder and CEO
The Martin Organization
- Ryan Bomberger
Chief Creative Officer
The Radiance Foundation
- Paul Gessing
President
The Rio Grande Foundation
- Floyd Brown
Publisher
Western Journal
- David Kupelian
Vice President and Managing Editor
WND
- Amy Kremer
Co-founder & Chairman
Women for Trump
- Jessica Jensen
Vice President & Chief of Staff
Young America's Foundation
- Alfonso Aguilar
President
Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles