A member of the Meta Oversight Board said in a recent livestream that Meta places “international human rights norms” above the First Amendment when it considers free speech issues. This admission is especially concerning considering a recent revelation that the FBI and CISA have renewed collaboration with social media companies to censor posts they label “disinformation.”

“As Meta became more global, it realized what an outlier the United States was, and could not simply default back to U.S. First Amendment jurisprudence,” said Kenji Yoshino, a member of the Meta Oversight Board, an independent entity that advises the platform. “Our baseline here is not the U.S. Constitution and free speech, but rather international human rights norms.”

Meta’s Censorship in Theory

Yoshino, a board member for the left-wing William J. Brennan Center for Justice, made this comment in a livestream with fellow Meta Oversight Board member and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution Michael McConnell. The National Constitution Center hosted the online panel on April 29, and its CEO Jeffrey Rosen moderated the discussion about ways Meta shapes content during elections.

Meta originally sought to follow the First Amendment, Yoshino said. But as Meta expanded across the world, he noted, it shifted its content policies beyond the First Amendment.

McConnell disagreed with Yoshino’s reasoning and said the more important distinction is the First Amendment’s application to private entities. But he admitted he agrees with Meta’s ability to censor content. “Even within the United States, private companies are free to not convey speech

In an environment of endless protest from the left, trans activists have moved from public disruption to simply disabling systems they do not like. On May 1, 2024, Utah launched a reporting form to enforce H.B. 257, a law signed by Gov. Spencer Cox in January that protects sex-designated spaces such as restrooms or locker rooms from intrusions by members of the opposite sex. The state auditor is required to investigate these reports, but within a week, the office received around 10,000 false complaints from trans activists attempting to overwhelm the system to make reporting and enforcement impossible.

Prominent trans activist Erin Reed argued, “If there are 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 form responses that are entered in, it’s going to be much harder for the auditor’s office to sift through every one of them and find the one legitimate trans person who was caught using a bathroom.” The enforcement, which only addresses the failure of government entities enforcing the new law, includes reporting the failure of government entities to contact law enforcement when a criminal complaint is filed (for instance, a complaint of men caught spying on women or girls in restrooms).

Utah Auditor John Dougall noted that while many complaints were easy to screen (e.g., those listing him in the complaint), others “appear credible at first glance and take much longer to filter out. His staff has spent the last week sorting through thousands of well-crafted complaints citing fake names or locations.” Activists have engaged in this behavior in other

Three years ago, a major story broke in Canada that seemed to confirm every left-wing prejudice against Christians imaginable: A mass grave containing the remains of indigenous children was supposedly discovered on the grounds of what had once been a government boarding school run by the Catholic Church.

It turns out the whole thing was a hoax, a modern-day blood libel against Christians that ended with at least 85 Catholic churches across Canada destroyed by arson, vandalized, or desecrated. Canadian political and civil society leaders cheered on this destruction — and then doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to investigate the mass graves and create a “support fund” for indigenous people.

To this day, no human remains have been recovered at the site of the alleged mass grave, despite nearly $8 million spent looking for them.

You won’t hear the corporate press report on this story now, but in the summer of 2021, it was everywhere. And no wonder, it had all the elements of a just-so story. The mere historical existence of these former boarding schools, which operated from the 1860s to the 1990s, remains a source of outrage among liberal Canadians. The residential school system, as it was called, often separated indigenous Canadian children from their families and communities, forcing them to attend chronically underfunded government schools, the purpose of which was to assimilate and acculturate indigenous Canadians into European Canadian society.

The history here was bad enough — a racist outrage, as far as Canadian liberals were concerned.