Paul & Daisy Soros: Meet the Fellows: Anna Makanju, 2003
Global Policy Manager, Content Regulation, Facebook
Anna Makanju is an immigrant from Russia
Fellowship awarded to support work towards a JDin Lawat Stanford University
Previously, she was the Special Policy Advisor for Europe and Eurasia to Vice President Biden, and prior to that she was the Senior Policy Advisor to the Permanent Representative at the United States Mission to the United Nations. She also was the Director for Russia at the National Security Council and the Chief of Staff for European and NATO Policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Anna was born in St. Petersburg, Russia to a Nigerian father and Ukrainian mother. When Anna was 11 years old, her family moved to Germany, then Phoenix, then Kuwait - where they lived until the beginning of the Persian Gulf War - and finally to Texas...
Following law school, Anna worked on the International Criminal Court, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and clerked for Judge Theodore McKee on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Following her clerkship, she worked in the international arbitration group of Cleary Gottlieb Steen and Hamilton LLP. She left her position at Cleary Gottlieb to work as a field organizer for the Obama for America campaign and joined the Obama administration in 2009...
https://www.pdsoros.org/meet-the-fellows/anna-makanju
yet another layer of censorship for Faceboo!
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 President’s 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 Facebook’s role in supporting President Rodrigo Duterte’s 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 company’s decisions on whether to remove content...
Facebook Oversight Board’s first twenty members, who were named in May, include Cadwalladr’s former boss at the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger. The body has yet to convene a meeting.
Cadwalladr’s 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 Facebook’s algorithms promote divisive, inflammatory, and extreme content; amplify disinformation and misinformation; and promote deceitful political advertising. These methods were crucial to Trump’s victory in 2016, and have not abated in the years since.
They’ve 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 Trump’s 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 Board’s 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 election’s outcome...
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-ad-hoc-group-of-activists-and-academics-convening-a-real-facebook-oversight-board