Free Republic

Facebook on Wednesday announced the first 20 members of its Oversight Board, an independent body that can overturn the company’s own content moderation decisions. The oversight board will govern appeals from Facebook and Instagram users and questions from Facebook itself, although it admitted it will have to pick and choose which content moderation cases to take due to the sheer volume of them.  The board will receive cases through a content management system that is linked to Facebook’s own platforms. They will then discuss the case as a group before issuing a final decision on whether the content should be allowed to stay...

A United Nations human rights expert is recommending changes in the way protests are handled in the United States, saying the process of issuing permits for demonstrations is “arbitrary” and could easily lead to discrimination against certain groups. Maina Kiai of Kenya, U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, offered preliminary findings Wednesday from his visits this month to seven U.S. cities — including the sites of this year’s Democratic and Republican political conventions — to investigate how the U.S. upholds its citizens’ rights of assembly and association. Kiai’s full report to the United Nations will...