The vast majority of Facebook’s “independent oversight board” established with authority to allow or remove content from the platform have ties to liberal billionaire George Soros or groups he supports, according to a new report.
An investigation by Sharyl Attkisson of RealClearPolitics showed that 18 out of the 20 members of the Facebook oversight board “collaborated with or are tied to groups” that have received funding from Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
Some of the board members include Evelyn Aswad, a U.S. law professor who received a grant from a foundation that has partnered with Soros. Aswad has also said she believes corporations should align their “speech codes with international human rights law” and be guided by “international law on freedom of expression.”
One of the board’s co-chairs, Jamal Greene, is a former aide to California Sen. Kamala Harris and a law school professor at Columbia University, both have ties to the Soros family and his foundation, according to the report. Greene’s Twitter account also contains several anti-Trump postings.
Board member Maina Kiai is the director of Human Rights Watch’s Alliances and Partnerships Initiative, which has taken $100 million from Soros. Kiai was also a founding member of the Kenya Human Rights Commission, which received over $600,000 from the Hungarian born donor and philanthropist.
Another co-chair, Denmark’s former socialist Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, has spoken out in favor of “rethinking” democracy and is a trustee at the Open Society Foundations-funded International Crisis Group, where Soros and his son Alexander are board members, according to the report.
In May, four board members wrote a New York Times op-ed promoting the board’s diversity and wide-ranging beliefs.
“The board members come from different professional, cultural and religious backgrounds and have various political viewpoints,” they wrote. “Some of us have been publicly critical of Facebook; some of us haven’t.
The post reads: ”So in November 2018, recognizing that no company should settle these issues alone, Facebook committed to creating an independent oversight body that will review Facebook’s decisions about what content to take down or leave up. Over the past 18 months, more than 2,000 experts and other relevant parties from 88 countries have contributed feedback that has shaped the development of this oversight board, which will have 20 members (ultimately growing to 40) and is scheduled to become operational this year.”
Soros has been actively funding far-left causes across the country through his organizations in recent years, including injecting money into city attorneys’ offices in Philadelphia and St. Louis.
Critics have argued that his support of St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner has already proven beneficial for Democratic causes in regards to rioting that has broken out and in the case of the McCloskey family.
Last month, Soros pumped $220 million into various organizations aimed at supporting the messaging of the Black Lives Matter movement, which its leaders self-proclaim is tied to Marxism.
