What the Trump ruling does and doesn't solve, plus: India's across-the-board failure and Ghani's warning to the Taliban ...
Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Subscribe here. May 5, 2021 In a decision previewed widely as a test for social-media governance, Facebook's Oversight Board on Wednesday upheld the platform's decision to suspend former US President Donald Trump, while criticizing the "indefinite" nature of the ban and giving Facebook six months to revisit it.
Law professor and Stanford Cyber Policy Center Co-Director Nate Persily writes in a Twitter thread that "the most important issue for me is how this decision institutionalizes the board and its powers vis a vis Facebook, going forward." (Likened by The Economist to Facebook's "Supreme Court," the board is "a global bevy of brainiacs," as the magazine summed it up: "ten are academics, five work in non-profits and think-tanks, two hail from journalism, one from politics and one is a Nobel peace laureate.")
Persily observes that in its ruling, the board asserted an authority to ask questions of Facebook and force it to reconsider its decisions. What the Ruling Didn't Solve Just about everyone found something not to like about the process—even the board itself.
As Persily notes, the board asked Facebook 46 questions, seven of which went unanswered, including a query as to whether Facebook's algorithms might be partly to blame for hyping Trump's term-violating posts. Facebook's silence on the matter "makes it difficult for the Board to assess whether less severe measures, taken earlier, may have been sufficient to protect the rights of others," the board wrote. At The New York Times, journalist Will Oremus airs the same concern, writing: "What Facebook needs to solve its Trump problem is not a binding decision from an appeals court but aggressive investigation into how it shapes the flow of political information."
It also remains unclear how Facebook might approach other world leaders. The Trump ruling figured to "guide Facebook on how to treat other politicians, such as Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro and the Philippines' Rodrigo Duterte," The Economist had written, previewing the decision—but University of Virginia media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan pleads for more scrutiny beyond US borders. "Please remember that India is the largest audience for Facebook and that only 230 million of the 2.7 BILLION Facebook users live in the United States," Vaidhyanathan tweets. "And that [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi is much more powerful and popular than Trump." Sponsor Content by The Ascent India's Across-the-Board Failure As Covid-19 devastates India—yielding reports of sick people dying as oxygen supplies run short and of capacity surpassed at cremation grounds—Sushant Singh writes for Foreign Policy that while India had recently gained a seat at the "global high table," the current disaster has debilitated its image and wrecked hopes of maintaining soft power, even giving India "a weaker hand" in its dealings with neighboring China and Pakistan.
At the Financial Times, Morgan Stanley Investment Management Chief Global Strategist Ruchir Sharma writes that the crisis reveals deeper flaws. "A crisis of this magnitude would stress even the world's best healthcare system. In India, it has exposed a pre-existing frailty—a broken state. … Among the world's 25 biggest emerging markets, India ranks last for the number of hospital beds per 1,000 citizens, fifth from last for doctors, and fourth last for nurses and midwives." Although Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised to modernize Indian governance, Sharma writes, the efficiency of India's state has languished. Ghani: Taliban Must Choose Peace With US troops set to withdraw from his country by Sept. 11, at Foreign Affairs, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani calls on the Taliban to make peace with his government. Proposing international mediation of stalled talks (ideally with the UN playing that role)—and threatening that the Taliban will choose "the peace of the grave" if it refuses to negotiate in good faith—Ghani pledges that if the country can form a transitional government, he will not seek to lead it. Ghani also calls for continued US and NATO funding for Afghanistan's security forces—and for the Taliban to respect the rights of women, girls, and minorities.
"Afghans cannot and absolutely will not go back to the horrors of the 1990s," Ghani writes, concluding that the best result will be "a sovereign, Islamic, democratic, united, neutral, and connected Afghanistan. I am willing to compromise and sacrifice to achieve that. The withdrawal of U.S. troops is an opportunity to get us closer to that end state, but only if all Afghans and their international partners commit to a clear path forward and stay the course." |
