Facebook censorship board member: Free speech is not a human right

Free speech is not a human right, according to prominent Facebook censorship board member Helle Thorning-Schmidt.

(Article by Jordan Davidson republished from TheFederalist.com)

“What we’re trying to find, of course, I think many of us engaging in this conversation, is that middle road. How do you moderate content and how do you find that balance between human rights and free speech, which is a human right, but also other human rights because free speech is not an absolute human right,” the Facebook Oversight Board co-chair said during a live stream of Politico’s Tech 28 spotlight.

“It has to be balanced with all the human rights and that is what the oversight is there to do,” she added.

“Free speech is not an absolute human right,” says Helle Thorning Schmidt, member of Facebook’s Oversight Board and former PM of Denmark. “It has to be balanced with other human rights.”

How does that translate to content moderation? It must strike a balance, find a middle. pic.twitter.com/E5reaQ2bnk

— POLITICOEurope (@POLITICOEurope) July 15, 2021

The former Danish prime minister went on to spuriously claim that without the oversight board, which oversees massive suppression campaigns and makes decisions such as whether to allow former President Donald Trump back on the platform.  She ignored the long list of politically motivated digital throttling completed by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others to claim that the oversight board could be the best end-all for tech content regulation.

“Now we have the oversight board which is a completely new invention to do this work and of course, I want to say that I think this is a very very positive new way of doing it,” she said, speaking highly of the tech giant’s newest censorship campaign.

Thorning-Schmidt previously argued in favor of Facebook’s oversight board colluding with other tech oligarchs to create a mass digital suppression campaign that spreads across all platforms.

“I don’t see the UN coming up with a solution that could work as quickly as the Facebook oversight board and that would have the right funding, the right members and that could take independent decisions that could be respected by the social media companies,” she said in May. “We are set up for other companies to join in the future.”

Just this week, the U.S. Surgeon General unveiled guidance pressuring tech giants to punish any COVID-19 dissidents guilty of spreading what they label as “misinformation” with excess censorship and surveillance.

“Limiting the spread of health misinformation is a moral and civic imperative that will require a whole-of-society effort,” Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy wrote in the introduction of a new report.

Read more at: TheFederalist.com