Why A Facebook Watchdog Group Is Cheering A Law That Could Hurt Journalists – BuzzFeed News

In the extended universe of the techlash, the Real Facebook Oversight Board presents itself as the Avengers.The members of the group, described on its website as a “‘Brains Trust’ to respond to the critical threats posed by Facebook’s unchecked power,” were summoned from the four corners of the internet by Carole Cadwalladr, the activist British journalist who broke the Cambridge Analytica scandal.(The group is not affiliated with Facebook and was started last year in confusingly named opposition to Facebook’s creation of its official Oversight Board, or, colloquially, “Facebook Supreme Court.”)They include some of the biggest names and loudest voices in the movement to hold tech platforms accountable for their influence: people like Shoshana Zuboff, who invented the idea of “surveillance capitalism”; Reed Galen, a cofounder of the conservative anti-MAGA super PAC the Lincoln Project; Roger McNamee, the early Facebook investor who has been publicly critical of the company; Yaël Eisenstat, the ex-CIA officer and former head of election integrity operations for political ads at Facebook; and Timothy Snyder, the Yale historian of fascism.So it was strange to see this superteam on Wednesday cheerleading a decision from the Australian High Court (the country’s version of the Supreme Court) that does nothing…
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