Facebook Enlists
Eric Holder’s Law Firm to ‘Advise’ on Anti-Conservative Bias
by Allum Bokhari2 May 2018
Facebook has enlisted
a team from law firm Covington and Burling to advise them on combating
perceptions of bias against conservatives. One minor detail: Covington and
Burling is the firm of Barack Obama’s left-wing former attorney general, Eric Holder.
According to Axios,
the team will be led by former Senate Republican Whip Jon Kyl. Kyl was a
vocal critic of Holder during his time in the Senate, and was rated highly by
conservative organizations. After Kyl retired from the Senate, he joined
Covington & Burling, where Holder had previously been a high-profile
partner.
The former attorney general is still a partner at
Covington & Burling, and was recently retained
by the state of California for their expected legal showdowns with the Trump
Administration. Holder has publicly flirted
with the idea of running for president in 2020, telling reporters earlier this
year that he would make a decision by the end of 2018.
So, to sum up: Facebook, a California-based company, has
enlisted the same firm that is providing legal advice to their state against
the Trump administration, through none other than Eric Holder, to advise them
on combating perceptions of bias against conservatives.
The Heritage Foundation will also be working with
Facebook on the same issue.
According to Axios, the conservative think-tank will
“will convene meetings on these issues with Facebook executives.” Klon
Kitchen, a former adviser to Sen. Ben Sasse who now works as a tech policy
expert at Heritage, has reportedly hosted an event with Facebook’s head of
global policy management.
Facebook has recently been engaged in outreach to
conservative organizations, but their focus has not been on censorship
concerns, but instead on securing free-market allies against the threat of
regulation.
One of those allies, Berin Szóka of TechFreedom, told
a congressional hearing on social media censorship that regulating social media
companies to protect free speech was contrary to conservative values. He did
not explain how a market dominated by monopolies like Facebook and Google is
still “free.”
Szóka, along with other free-market conservatives, had
previously been invited to a meeting with
Facebook representatives aimed at fending off the so-called “rush to regulate”
the platform, which holds a dominant position in the social media market with
over 2 billion users.
It remains to be seen whether Facebook’s introduction of
outside advisers is a genuine attempt to address widely-documented cases of
anti-conservative bias on the platform — like the recent, purportedly mistaken,
bans of Pamela Geller and
an anti-illegal immigration
group’s event — or just another attempt to fend off regulation.
We have reached out to Facebook, The Heritage Foundation,
and the office of former Sen. Jon Kyl for comment.
RESEARCHER’S NOTE: Eric Holder was a board member for the
American Constitution Society, and an intern at the NAACP Legal Defense &
Educational Fund, both organizations were funded by George Soros’s Foundations.
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Saturday, September 2, 2017
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