Facebook’s new oversight board member made joke about Barron Trump during impeachment
By Emily JacobsMay 7, 2020 | 5:14pm
“I want to apologize for mentioning the president’s son, it was wrong for me to do that,” she said.
Facebook describes Karlan on the oversight board’s website as having a background in three areas: voting and the political process, constitutional law and the law of democracy.
The social media giant has faced years of criticism for its handling of abusive content and misinformation, including allegations of political bias and censorship of conservative media outlets, something the company has denied.
As for if the oversight board will have credibility to the public, Facebook’s head of global affairs Nick Clegg told Reuters that the board would earn that over time.
“I don’t expect people to say, ‘Oh hallelujah, these are great people, this is going to be a great success’ — there’s no reason anyone should believe that this is going to be a great success until it really starts hearing difficult cases in the months and indeed years to come,” he said.
The board will be set up as a Supreme Court-style and eventually hopes to expand to 40 members. It also hopes to have authority outside of Facebook.
Facebook formed a separate legal trust with an $130 million investment, but is allowing the trust to accept funding from other sources and form new companies. This system, according to Protocol, ensures that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg would not have the ability to shut the board down if he disagreed with their rulings.The problem, however, is that the trust could then one day spin off new oversight boards for other social media giants like Google, Twitter and others.Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), a staunch critic of big tech, argued that the move further proves his belief that Facebook should be broken up.“This is how powerful @Facebook is, how much speech it controls, how much of our time & attention it claims: it now has a special censorship committee to decide what speech can stay & what should go. Facebook basically making the case it should be broken up,” he tweeted Wednesday.
https://nypost.com/2020/05/07/facebook-board-member-pamela-karlan-joked-about-barron-trump-at-impeachment/
An impeachment witness foreshadowed Trump's coronavirus response before the pandemic even began
"Well run States should not be bailing out poorly run States, using CoronaVirus as the excuse!" the president tweeted on Tuesday. "The elimination of Sanctuary Cities, Payroll Taxes, and perhaps Capital Gains Taxes, must be put on the table. Also lawsuit indemnification & business deductions for restaurants & ent."
He also told the New York Post in a wide-ranging interview published that day that it would be unfair to Republicans if Congress passed a "bailout" for coronavirus-stricken states because the states that would benefit were run by Democrats.
"It's not fair to the Republicans because all the states that need help, they're run by Democrats in every case," Trump said. "Florida is doing phenomenal. Texas is doing phenomenal. The Midwest is, you know, fantastic — very little debt."
(Every US state is battling a coronavirus outbreak, and recent data has indicated that the number of confirmed cases is still rising everywhere in the country outside of New York, which has seen a decline in recent weeks. Traditionally Democratic-led, high-tax states also contribute more to the federal government than Republican-led, low-tax states, and red states benefit more from federal government assistance than blue states do.)
Jeffrey Cramer, a former longtime federal prosecutor who spent 12 years at the Justice Department, told Business Insider that Trump's views on tying federal funds to political favors or requiring states to change their policies "has been consistent" and was "similar to tying aid to Ukraine in exchange for them to investigate a political opponent."
https://www.businessinsider.com/impeachment-witness-pamela-karlan-predicted-trump-coronavirus-quid-pro-quo-2020-5