Meta’s leftist, anti-free speech Oversight Board has somehow managed to evolve into something worse by expanding to Europe with a new foreign appeals center to assist government crackdowns on speech.
The Oversight Board’s new Appeals Centre Europe, first reported by The Washington Post on Oct. 8, is funded by a one-time $15 million grant by the Board’s trust. It is specifically designed to comply with a harsh censorship law in the European Union (EU). Significantly, the new Appeals Centre will not only determine what speech is and is not allowed on Meta’s platforms (including Facebook) but also appeals from Google-owned YouTube and Communist Chinese government-tied TikTok.
The Post reported that the Centre “will function under a sweeping European law known as the Digital Services Act [DSA], which requires tech companies to allow users to appeal restrictions on their accounts before an independent group of experts.” But the DSA aims to regulate and suppress not only “illegal content” but also supposed “disinformation,” a leftist catch-all often abused to justify censorship of any content that doesn’t comport with the left’s narrative.
Appeals Centre Europe CEO Thomas Hughes bragged that the new Centre "is really a game changer,” that “could really drive platform accountability and transparency,” The Post explained. The Appeals Centre’s creators, the Oversight Board and its members, have been notorious for their consistent attacksagainst free speech.
Indeed, even though the Board prioritizes protecting LGBTQ individuals to the point of suppressing scientific speech on their behalf, it also ruled that the genocidal, anti-Semitic, terrorist phrase “From the River to the Sea” is allowed on Meta’s platforms, demonstrating bias in its censorship.
In February, Board member Pamela San Martín claimed Facebook’s 2020 U.S. election-interfering censorship was not sufficient. That’s despite the fact that a Media Research Center poll found in November 2020 that at least 13 percent of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s voters would not have voted for him had they known the scandals censored by Big Tech and the media.
In May, Oversight Board member Prof. Kenji Yoshino admitted the First Amendment isn’t the north star for the anti-free speech cabal, “Our baseline here is not the US Constitution and free speech, but rather international human rights norms.” The new Appeals Centre could be even more draconian than the Board, given its compliance with the DSA, which has historically been weaponized by the EU against free speech.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Meta here and demand that it be held to account to mirror the First Amendment and provide an equal platform for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using MRC Free Speech America’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
