Cadwalladr has a new mission, for which she is well-suited?
15 Oct: New Yorker: The Ad-Hoc Group of Activists and Academics Convening a Real Facebook Oversight Board
by Sue Halpern
Two hours before Donald Trump boosted the standing of white supremacists at the last Presidential debate, Facebook told Rashad Robinson, the president of the civil-rights organization Color of Change, that it would not remove a potentially incendiary and racially tinged Trump-campaign post. The message in question showed the Presidents eldest son, Donald Trump, Jr., calling upon an army of Trump supporters to show up at polls across the country, to protect the election...
Robinson recounted the experience at the launch, over Zoom, of the Real Facebook Oversight Board, an international, ad-hoc cadre of activists and academics convened by the British investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr. Cadwalladr was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize last year, for exposing the malpractices of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, both in the U.S. and abroad. That reporting led her to the realization that journalism alone is not enough. Earlier this year, she started a nonprofit called All the Citizens, which is organizing the Real Facebook Oversight Board. This is an emergency intervention, focussed on the American election, she told me, a few hours before the launch. Other members include Maria Ressa, a Filipino journalist and leading critic of Facebooks role in supporting President Rodrigo Dutertes murderous regime; Derrick Johnson, the president of the N.A.A.C.P.; Shireen Mitchell, the founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women; and Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor.
Our group has come together for one purpose, Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard Business School professor emerita and the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, said on the Zoom call. We demand comprehensive action to insure that Facebook cannot be weaponized to undermine the vote. Jonathan Greenblatt, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, which has been tracking hate groups for decades, observed that Facebook actively and knowingly has facilitated the flow of poison into the population, and enabled waves of anti-Semitism and racism, Holocaust denialism and Islamophobic conspiracies, disinformation and extremism. The Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe called his participation in the Real Facebook Oversight Board probably the most important effort in my fifty-year career in the law.
The Real Facebook Oversight Board is a self-appointed proxy for the official Facebook Oversight Board, which was designed to function as a kind of independent appeals court, adjudicating various challenges to the companys decisions on whether to remove content...
Facebook Oversight Boards first twenty members, who were named in May, include Cadwalladrs former boss at the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger. The body has yet to convene a meeting.
Cadwalladrs board has embraced a broader definition of oversight than the one championed by Zuckerberg. From now until the election, its members will use their various platforms to expose the many ways in which Facebooks algorithms promote divisive, inflammatory, and extreme content; amplify disinformation and misinformation; and promote deceitful political advertising. These methods were crucial to Trumps victory in 2016, and have not abated in the years since.
Theyve contributed to a proliferation of QAnon, white-supremacist militias, anti-vaccine propaganda, and coronavirus falsehoods...
Now, as Trump continues to question, without evidence, the legitimacy of the upcoming election, there is a real danger that his campaign and its followers will use Facebook to sow chaos after the polls close, by challenging the results, posting false information, or inciting Trumps base to violence. The most valuable thing this board can do is to inoculate voters, by giving them the facts, McNamee told me...
The Real Facebook Oversight Boards inaugural demands are fairly modest: first, Facebook must remove posts that incite violence, even those from public figures, including the President; second, Facebook must ban all advertising that mentions Presidential-election results until one person is definitively declared the winner, and his opponent concedes; and, third, Facebook must label as untrue any post that declares a winner, until the victory is certified and the losing candidate has conceded. A few hours after the group enumerated these demands, it scored its first win: Facebook announced that it would not allow any ads that delegitimized the elections outcome...
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-ad-hoc-group-of-activists-and-academics-convening-a-real-facebook-oversight-board
Since Hillary has advised Biden to never concede, that means that Facebook will never allow any Trump victory to be considered legitimate.