Conservatives were already critical of Facebook’s new content Oversight Board. Now, they have even more reasons to complain.
Facebook released the third and final version of the radical left’s audit of its operations last week. As the company caves increasingly to critics demanding more speech restrictions, it was still shocking how much Facebook works actively with the left.
According to the newly released so-called “civil rights” audit, “The Auditors were repeatedly consulted during the process of building the initial slate of Board members.” Naturally, they “strongly advocated for the Board’s membership to be diverse, representative, and inclusive of those with expertise in civil rights.”
The left got what they wanted. The resulting board, Facebook’s new content Supreme Court, has been criticized as being radical leftist and anti-American. Only two on the board can make any claim on having some conservative views, and only one of those is a social conservative. The other is libertarian.
The report stressed that “the Auditors did not have input into all Board member selections or veto power over specific nominees.” [Boldface added.] Note the word “all.”
It’s important to see those comments in context. The report was filled with ways the company gave access to, worked with or made changes at the behest of the radical left. Most of the reasons the audit made news at all was because Facebook refused to do everything the leftists demanded. The areas where it refused — censoring the president, especially — still infuriated the auditors and their backers.
But when it came to the Oversight Board, the auditors supported the resulting choices as “positive developments that help lend the Board credibility in the Auditors’ view.”
The audit was written by former ACLU legislative director Laura Murphy and endorsed by Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, a strident leftist who has given at least $2 million to Planned Parenthood.
The report landed with a bang as the radical left made it known that it still was unhappy with the numerous changes and initiatives designed to push their causes.
Despite that, Murphy said she had reached out to more than 100 leftist groups, and they “championed the Audit as a collaborative and less adversarial mechanism for effecting systemic change at Facebook.”
That meant “diversity and inclusion.” The report included 86 mentions of diversity and another 47 of the word “diverse.” All retained the leftist definition. The audit hailed “A commitment to have 50% of Facebook’s workforce be from underrepresented communities by the end of 2023.” Nowhere in those groups was a Facebook mention to include Christians or conservatives, both ridiculously underrepresented at the company.
The report did mention some interesting demographic realities, mostly that Facebook’s employees are much less white and much more LGBT than the rest of the population:
- “A majority Facebook’s Civil Rights Audit 60 of its employees are white (44%) and Asian (43%).” It’s strange to depict a group underrepresented as a “majority.” Facebook is a California-based company that, admittedly, has a global reach. Still, that 44 percent is massively lower than the United States, which has a white population of 60.1 percent, according to the U.S. Census.
- “In 2020, Facebook will report that 8% of its US workforce self-identified as LGBTQA+ (based on a 54% response rate), noting a 1% rise in representation from 2016.” That is also substantially higher than the 4.5 percent estimate from the Williams Institute.
Other items of note from the audit include:
- Facebook has created “a senior (Vice President) civil rights leadership role,” giving the left added internal influence.
- “Facebook has committed to embedding civil rights screening criteria within certain existing product review processes.”
- A great deal of the report was focused on bias by the computer programs that run Facebook. The problem was described in detail in ““Facebook Audit Exposes Algorithm Biases in Policing Speech,” by Kalev Leetaru of Real Clear Politics.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Facebook headquarters at 1-650-308-7300 or 1-650-543-4800 and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
