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Facebook Oversight Board Member Joins Biden DOJ

Pam Karlan joins growing list of former FB employees in new administration

 
 
 

(Photo by MANDEL NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

Santi Ruiz - FEBRUARY 6, 2021 3:45 PM

One of Facebook’s original Oversight Board members tasked with handing down binding rulings on content moderation is leaving to join the Justice Department. The move marks a growing pattern of Facebook employees adding to the ranks of the Biden administration.

Pamela Karlan will serve as principal deputy assistant attorney general in the civil rights division, an Oversight Board representative announced Saturday.

The coterie of former Facebook employees now serving in the Biden administration includes Jeff Zients, coronavirus czar, and Erskine Bowles, a transition team adviser, both served on Facebook’s board. Biden’s staff secretary is Jessica Hertz, formerly a lawyer focused on regulatory affairs for the social media giant in Washington, D.C.

A professor at Stanford, Karlan previously took a leave of absence from the board to volunteer on the Biden transition team. She had not participated in any of the cases on which the Oversight Board ruled, including the upcoming case to determine whether President Trump will be allowed back on Facebook.

"Working with my colleagues on the Oversight Board to build a fairer and more effective approach to content moderation has been an honor," Karlan said in a statement. "The Board has a critical role to play in holding Facebook to account, and I will continue to watch their work with great admiration."

During Trump’s first impeachment trial in 2019, Karlan testified that the president "must be held to account." She has written extensively about campaign finance reform and voting rights.

Oversight Board spokesman John Taylor said, "Pam Karlan’s legal and civil rights expertise played an important part in shaping the Board and we’re grateful for her contributions. The Trustees and Board members congratulate Pam on her new role and wish her the very best."

Cruz Previews Assault on Big Tech

 
 
 

Sen. Ted Cruz / Getty Images

Graham Piro - OCTOBER 19, 2020 5:00 PM

Republican senator Ted Cruz (Texas) said the leaders of Facebook and Twitter will answer to Congress for their suppression of the New York Post‘s reporting about Hunter Biden before Election Day.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey will be called upon "to explain to the committee and to the American people why Twitter is abusing its market power to interfere in the election and censor media reporting of evidence suggesting Joe Biden's personal corruption concerning two foreign nations," Cruz told reporters during a conference call Monday afternoon.

Cruz did not give a specific date for the appearances before the Senate Judiciary Committee but said it would occur before Nov. 3 because of the urgency of the issue. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will also be called upon to appear.

"This poses the single greatest threat to free speech in America today. It poses the single greatest threat to democracy in America today," Cruz said.

Twitter and Facebook suppressed the circulation of the New York Post‘s reporting about a trove of emails and documents from a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden. Facebook suppressed the story's distribution on the platform's news feeds while it was being fact-checked, and Twitter did not allow individual users to tweet or send the stories via direct message for a period of time. Twitter also did not allow a follow-up story from the Post to be circulated by individual users.

Dorsey said the platform was wrong to block the story, and Twitter also updated its "hacked materials" policy to allow press coverage of hackings in the future.

But the policy change was too little, too late for Cruz. He said tech corporations could be engaged in "potentially serious campaign finance violations" by censoring stories harmful to the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden.

"Even left-wing Democratic journalists who hate President Trump should pause for a second and ask, ‘What the hell are we doing allowing a couple of Silicon Valley billionaires to decide what the press is allowed to report and what they're not?'" Cruz said.