Monday, 17 May 2021

POLITICO

POLITICO

Germany’s Schäuble condemns anti-Semitism at pro-Palestinian protests

Posted: 17 May 2021 03:57 AM PDT

Bundestag President Wolfgang Schäuble on Monday condemned the “unbearable” anti-Semitism on display at many pro-Palestinian protests in Germany over the weekend.

Israel’s politics can be “sharply criticized,” but “there is no justification for anti-Semitism, hatred and violence,” Schäuble told Bild, adding that violence ought to be punished with “the full force of the law” and that Germany needed to provide “the greatest possible protection for Jewish communities and institutions.”

His comments come after attacks on synagogues and anti-Semitic incidents at several German demonstrations meant to show solidarity with Palestinians in the wake of escalating violence between Israel and Gaza. While many protested peacefully, some burnt Israeli flags and shouted anti-Semitic slogans.

“Whoever does not clearly distance themselves in their protest when Israel’s right to exist is attacked is complicit,” Schäuble said.

Senior figures across Germany’s political landscape — among them Chancellor Angela Merkel, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer as well as opposition leaders — have similarly condemned the surge in anti-Semitic incidents and attacks in recent days.

Tax the rich? Executives predict Biden’s big plans will flop

Posted: 17 May 2021 03:29 AM PDT

WASHINGTON — U.S. President Joe Biden wants to fund his $4.1 trillion infrastructure and family policy agenda with a huge pile of tax increases on corporations and the wealthy. The business community is dismissing the threat.

Corporate executives and lobbyists in Washington, New York and around the country say they are confident they can kill almost all of these tax hikes by pressuring moderate Democrats in the House and Senate. And they think progressive Democrats don't really care about the costs of new programs and will be happy to push through as much spending as they can and then run on tax hikes in 2022 rather than actually pass them this year.

Interviews with over a dozen executives, lobbyists and business group officials turned up a similar theme: While Democrats might be able to push through a slightly higher top corporate rate, when it comes to higher taxes on the rich, on capital gains, on financial transactions or private equity profits, forget it. It’s not happening.

"With business-minded and more centrist members on the Democratic side in both the House and Senate, they look at the scope and breadth of these tax increases for the infrastructure and families plans and they just find them jaw-dropping," said Neil Bradley, chief policy officer at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "You are talking about tax hikes that could hit millions of small businesses across the country and taxes that could kill investment. From a raw political perspective, it would be a really funky decision for these moderates to say they would be willing to put this much of a wet blanket on an economy that is really poised to take off."

If the executives are right, Biden will have to either break his pledge to pay for his massive spending agenda and further swell the deficit or he’ll have to sharply scale back his plans. And slashing them in any significant way would anger the progressive wing of his party, which sees this as the president’s only chance to fundamentally tilt the economy back toward workers and make it more equitable.

Lobbyists and executives say they have been talking to moderate Democrats in the Senate like Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and John Hickenlooper of Colorado along with House members like Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, Tom Suozzi of New York and Stephanie Murphy of Florida. Most of the lawmakers either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.

The lobbyists say most of the members they’ve spoken to have indicated a willingness to push back against many of the proposed tax increases in Biden's plan.

"They are mostly willing to go with a 25 percent corporate tax, and the odds of that getting through reconciliation are pretty solid," said the head of one of the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington, referring to the parliamentary maneuver that would require a simple majority vote on the legislation. "Where it gets murky for them is when you talk about a carbon tax or a gas tax or a financial transactions tax or higher carried interest or capital gains taxes. That's where the coalition of the willing falls through."

The lobbyist did not want to be identified by name or organization to avoid giving away strategy. Others spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid angering the lawmakers with whom they're engaging.

There are also a number of Democrats from the Northeast and California, like Gottheiner and Suozzi, who say they won't back any tax hikes unless the state and local (SALT) tax deduction, which was reduced under former President Donald Trump, is restored, further easing the path for lobbyists to block many of Biden's proposed tax hikes.

"I support the president's agenda, but any changes to the tax code must be accompanied with a fix of SALT – "no SALT, no deal!" Suozzi said in a statement.

Lobbyists and executives say they expect Biden to cut a smaller infrastructure deal and perhaps get through some of his families agenda, which includes expanding free public education and assistance for child care. But they don't believe that the White House will be able to move significant tax hikes through the House or the Senate.

"It's going to be very tough on them to do anything on the personal side," said a senior Washington lobbyist who works on tax issues. "It's not impossible, but even that's a struggle. Moderates in the House make it much more difficult to pass this stuff. I think the personal side probably gets left alone. And most of the rest of it has no chance." Among other measures, Biden has proposed raising the top marginal tax rate on individuals to 39.6 percent from 37 percent now.

The White House and progressive groups reject all of this, saying that boosting taxes on corporations and the wealthy is necessary to make long-term economic investments. And they note that such tax hikes — including raising the capital gains rate and returning private equity taxes to the regular income rate — are politically popular.

They also say that much of what Biden aims to do will take place over a decade and that the tax hikes will do nothing to slow economic growth or boost inflation.

"A lot of people are thinking about this the wrong way," said a person close to the administration, who also didn't want to be identified because he’s not authorized to speak publicly about Biden's plans. "The spending is over a long time frame and most of the taxes we are talking about would just return some fairness to the code and make those who are able to pay more to pay more. And we are talking about increasing long-term productivity and addressing a lot of structural problems in the economy."

Yet the White House faces significant pushback over the price tag of its plans — an additional $4 trillion on top of the more than $5 trillion that Congress has already appropriated for Covid relief so far. The case for pumping in more money is especially complicated with inflation showing signs of ticking up even as the Federal Reserve and many economists predict the price hikes will be transitory and ease as the pandemic fades and production ramps up.

April's jobs number was surprisingly poor but could have been an anomaly. And most economists expect hiring to pick up sharply in May with significant wage hikes to follow. But the economic trajectory remains highly uncertain, leading many executives and lobbyists to argue that raising taxes right now doesn't make sense.

"I've been through a lot of the tax hike efforts, but now is a tough time for [Democrats] to get a lot of them done," said a former Democratic operative now working in a senior role on Wall Street. "The economy is clearly coming back, but it would be a weird time to slap more taxes on people."

Democrats sympathetic to Biden's proposal and in favor of his tax plans argue that the economy is set to roar back, making it the ideal time to increase some tax rates on investment gains and corporate profits.

"There are real challenges to selling the 'Build Back Better' agenda to moderates on both sides," said Jason Furman, a Harvard professor who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama. "But I don't think a strong economy should really affect the case. In fact, if anything it's an argument that we can move from a short-run focus on Covid recovery to a much longer-run focus on improving the economy."

But lobbyists believe that the combination of inflation fears and an economy that is showing signs of booming but remains vulnerable will leave them plenty of room to kill most of Biden's proposed tax increases.

"It really all depends on how far they go," said a senior financial services industry lobbyist. "[Biden's] advisers will at some point say that they can get something that is kind of down the middle of the fairway with a corporate rate hike. Anything else and Democrats are just going to get killed over it."

‘Way too soon’ for second coronavirus recovery plan, Vestager says

Posted: 16 May 2021 11:52 PM PDT

“It’s way too soon to consider” a second coronavirus pandemic recovery plan, Executive Vice President of the European Commission Margrethe Vestager told French daily Les Echos in an interview published Monday.

“I find it strange to discuss a new plan we’re not sure we need, when we already have so much to do,” Vestager said, when asked whether U.S. President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion plan, announced in March, could push the EU to bulk up its €750 billion pandemic recovery effort. “The goal, by the way, is not to spend the biggest amount of money, but to yield the best results,” she added.

Asked why the EU is reluctant to get on board with Biden’s proposal for waiving patent rights for COVID-19 vaccines, Vestager said: “Patents are not the problem. The difficulty is in increasing production capacity to speed up vaccination, and for people to register to be inoculated.” She added that it’s “simpler to negotiate with a handful of players who own patent rights rather than letting them be accessible for everyone, with no one feeling really responsible for production levels.”

“I won’t go into American motivations. I’ll just note that they’re not exporting any vaccine,” Vestager said.

On the EU’s handling of the pandemic, Vestager said the bloc “could have avoided many pitfalls if the deals we signed with pharmaceutical firms were more transparent.”

The Commission vice president also addressed resistance among some EU countries against Biden’s 21 percent global minimum tax proposal. Asked whether the EU’s unanimity requirement for tax rules was a problem, Vestager acknowledged that “decisions on taxation are still too slow in Europe. But a lot has been done in recent years, despite the unanimity rule. What matters is the momentum that creates the change … Now that the United States is more ambitious, we’re able to move forward and find an agreement by this summer.”

Vestager also discussed the Commission’s proposal to tackle unfair competition from companies receiving state aide from countries like China. “Of the 10 to 15 takeovers that have taken place recently, some would have fallen within the scope of this regulation,” Vestager said. On when she expects the proposal to enter into law, Vestager said: “The draft is ready, it just needs to be adopted. The ball is in the European Parliament’s court.”

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Boris Johnson banks on British caution as restrictions lift

Posted: 16 May 2021 07:00 PM PDT

LONDON — Boris Johnson is banking on British caution as he pushes ahead with England’s biggest step toward freedom from COVID-19 restrictions yet, despite fears the fast-transmitting Indian variant of the disease is taking hold.

Six people or two households will be allowed to meet indoors from Monday, and those eating and drinking in pubs and restaurants in England will no longer be at the mercy of the unpredictable British weather, with indoor hospitality allowed to reopen.

But in comments released by No. 10 Downing Street ahead of restrictions being eased, the U.K. prime minister warned the public to “take this next step with a heavy dose of caution.”

"I urge everyone to be cautious and take responsibility when enjoying new freedoms today in order to keep the virus at bay," he added.

Arrival from India

On Sunday, Johnson’s Health Secretary Matt Hancock was unleashed to hammer home the potential risks the new COVID variant, first discovered in India, may pose.

Just over 1,300 cases have so far been identified, and Hancock said it is becoming the dominant strain in some parts of the country, including Bolton and Blackburn. There are also smaller numbers of cases in other parts of the country.

The virus could "spread like wildfire" among unvaccinated groups, he warned. "If it gets out of hand, we will have a very, very large number of cases,” he said. Even with the “high” protection from the vaccine, it was “not absolute” and a very large number of cases would have a “knock-on to hospitalizations” from the disease, he added.

Ministers have been buoyed by “very early data” from Oxford University labs that suggests the U.K.’s vaccines do work against the new version of the disease. But with the U.K. government only hitting its target of giving two-thirds of the population a first vaccine last week, the rollout may not be moving fast enough to avert a wave of hospitalizations.

“We're in a race between the vaccination program and the virus and this new variant has given the virus some extra legs in that race,” Hancock warned.

People over the age of 35 will be able to book their COVID-19 vaccine this week, and second doses for the most vulnerable are being brought forward to give the most vulnerable maximum protection.

Reverse, reverse

For now, ministers are pushing ahead with plans to ease restrictions.

Johnson is under pressure from his own backbenchers not to veer off course. Former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith warned ministers over the weekend to “hold their nerves,” saying a “stop-go, stop-go approach will roll us into the winter with an economic disaster.”

“We have got to be careful, but we are so jittery we are in danger of frightening ourselves into a corner,” he said.

Johnson has, however, already raised the prospect of delaying England’s planned final easing of restrictions in June. Hancock too did not rule out a reversal in the easing of some restrictions when asked about the prospect on Sunday.

"I very much hope not and our goal remains, our strategy remains to take a cautious and irreversible approach to ensure that we are always looking at the data all the way through and, crucially, to use the vaccine to get us out of this pandemic," he said.

In the meantime, the hope in ministerial circles is that Britons will avoid going over-the-top on Monday, and keep indoor contact to a minimum.

“Outside is safer than inside, so even though you can from tomorrow meet up inside, it's still better to meet up outside,” Hancock said.

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Panther pandemonium polarizes Slovenia ahead of EU presidency

Posted: 16 May 2021 07:00 PM PDT

A mysterious panther is causing a commotion as Slovenia prepares to take over the EU’s rotating presidency.

The trouble blew up over reports that Prime Minister Janez Janša’s government plans to give cufflinks featuring a panther as a gift to senior European officials during its presidency of the Council of the EU.

Janša, a right-wing populist who polarizes domestic opinion, sees the panther as a symbol of Slovenia. He likes panthers so much he once wrote a novel set in 203 BC called "The White Panther." 

But there's a hitch. 

Historians say the "Carantanian panther" promoted by Janša is fake — a symbol that some began attributing to the small southeast European nation in the 1980s in an effort to create a glorious past. 

What's more, the panther has been adopted by extreme-right groups in Slovenia — and some Slovenians now associate it with far-right nationalist ideology. 

"During the 7th century, a political unit, called Carantania in contemporary sources, emerged as the first Slavic principality of the wider area of Eastern Alps/North Adriatic," said Miha Kosi, a historian and senior research fellow at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. 

"It never included the area of present day Slovenia, only a tiny bit in the northeast," he said.  

But the idea of Carantania as a precursor to today's Slovenian state has a romantic appeal for some. An "enthusiastic Slovenian" invented a coat of arms for Carantanians just four decades ago, according to Kosi. 

"He even single-handedly sketched it — and that is the controversial animal we are talking about today," the historian said, noting that coats of arms were not even used in Europe when Carantania existed.

Even panther opponents accept the animal was used as a symbol in later centuries in some parts of the region, and acknowledge that it is already utilized by the headquarters of the Slovenian army — although generally not on uniforms.

But the prospect of panther-themed cufflinks for European bigwigs during the Council presidency, which begins on July 1, prompted multiple Slovenian historians to speak out.

Most Slovene people “don’t identify themselves with this symbol and find it grotesque, amusing and unacceptable," Kosi said. 

"With it, the government and nationalistic right-wing associations are only trying to promote a fictional old 'glorious past' of the nation, which under this banner never existed," he added.   

Peter Štih, a professor of medieval history at the University of Ljubljana who is also the president of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, called the panther “a modern Slovenian historical myth and nothing more.”

“As a historian I regret that it is used for official purposes,” he said in an email.

Opposition politicians have also pounced on the panther plan.

“Slovenia has many symbols that unite our nation, engraved in our heritage and in our identity — Triglav mountain, the linden tree leaf, the colours of our flag — that embrace the European values of brotherhood, freedom and human rights,” MEP Tanja Fajon, leader of Slovenia’s Social Democrats, said in an email.

“Sadly [the] Slovenian government is again attempting to reinvent our national symbols in far-right fashion of mystic historical heraldry. The black panther is a fairly recent invention which has been … a symbol adopted by extreme nationalists, Janša fanatics, anti-immigrant and paramilitary guards and neo-Nazis.”

But Janša has defended the symbol and accused critics of overreacting, pointing out that the panther played a role during the country’s previous stint at the helm of the Council, when he was also prime minister. "The Carantanian panther was already on the pins of the Slovenian presidency of the EU in 2008," he tweeted. Photos from 2008 presidency events show that some European leaders wore panther-themed pins at the time.

In another tweet, the prime minister — who has been fiercely critical of some journalists and media outlets — posted a video of a black panther and tagged an independent television station.

Slovenia's diplomatic mission to the EU declined to confirm whether the country plans to give out panther-themed cufflinks as part of its presidency.

"The procurement procedures regarding the gifts of the Slovenian Council Presidency are still ongoing," a spokesperson said. "The gifts selected will be presented to the public in the beginning of June." 

For the next pandemic, we need plans not heroes

Posted: 16 May 2021 07:00 PM PDT

Elisabeth Braw is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Call it the 21st century's Dunkirk moment. When COVID-19 hit the U.K., Portobello Road Gin — a high end distillery — quickly retooled to make hand sanitizer for the Metropolitan Police. In Yorkshire, the fashion company Burberry pivoted from tailoring trench coats to churning out hospital gowns, selling them to the British government.

Actions like these were a laudable response to a pandemic few saw coming. But now it's time for governments to get serious. If the next pandemic finds us depending on isolated improvisations by businesses and individuals, it won't be a moment for cheering human ingenuity. It will be due to an unforgivable lack of planning.

So far, there are few signs we have learned our lesson, even as memories of the chaotic, deadly first months of the coronavirus crisis start to fade. Part of the problem is the temptation to plan for the last war — because we’re unable to imagine what’s next.

"If someone had said two years ago…that we in Finland would need 1.2 billion pieces of [personal protective equipment] to be able to handle a pandemic, people would have laughed," said Kimmo Kohvakka, the Finnish Interior Ministry's Director General for Rescue Services. (The Rescue Services are akin to a national emergency management agency.)

Even though Finland’s National Emergency Supply Agency, NESA, looks after massive reserves, not even the Finns were able to store every product and component the country needed during the worst days of the pandemic. After a good start, Helsinki struggled to secure supplies even for Finland’s relatively small population of 5.5 million.

"You have a good estimate, good planning, good interpretation of threat scenarios," said Kohvakka. "But the key difficulty is, what level of preparedness do we need?"

If you guess wrong, you pay — in money, lives and chaos. The U.K.’s National Audit Office found that Britain spent 500 percent more for personal protective equipment in the first half of 2020 than the same equipment would have cost in 2019. Supermarkets hardly did better. Uncertainty over the pandemic's impact on food supplies drove panic buying, leading to shortages of some basic consumer goods. In France, sales of frozen foods rose 63 percent from 2019 to 2020. In Germany sales of packaged foods rose by 56 percent last year.

Some efforts to stockpile of essentials like medicine and food are underway. In March 2020, the EU wisely concluded that a common European stockpile of medical equipment was necessary. The new rescEU stockpile will include masks, ventilators, vaccine and other supplies, with the European Commission footing 90 percent of the bill. U.S. President Joe Biden has issued an executive order to boost American medical stockpiles similarly.

But apart from personal protective equipment and ventilators, what else will countries need in a crisis? Nobody knows, because it's impossible to predict perfectly which goods and components the next emergency might cut off.

The unpredictable nature of the future means governments will still need private companies to help, by nimbly switching their production lines to whatever’s needed when a crisis strikes. But they’ll need to do that much more efficiently and cheaply than was often the case last spring. "Should something come up that we haven't been able to predict, it shouldn't be a reason for political turmoil," said Kohvakka. "We should have the flexibility to respond even to situations we can't predict."

Governments and the private sector could start that collaboration before crisis strikes, by gaming out scenarios together. Crisis rehearsals, carried off the way militaries conduct war games, would help governments and businesses jointly determine where supply chains will strain under different scenarios, and what steps would be needed keep needed necessary equipment on hand.

The Czech Republic has emerged as a pioneer in the area — conducting exercises that imagine different threats, most of them falling in the grey zone between war and peace, and involving private companies in the exercises.

Those exercises can also help Europe become less reliant on rivals. The world's top maker of facemasks, coveralls and aprons is China — and the Chinese government has shown a willingness to pinch off supply chains when it suits them. Last year, Beijing imposed export restrictions on personal protective equipment at the height of the crisis, causing EU governments to have to pay steep premiums for the supplies. Independently, some Chinese-made supplies sent to European countries including Spain and the Netherlands proved defective.

The time to apply those lessons is now, before the next crisis hits. Relying on ginmakers to equip the police and making surgical scrubs from old rain coats is a great story to tell our grandchildren. It’s not a viable strategy for making sure they stay safe during whatever crises they might face.

Netanyahu doesn’t see ‘immediate’ end to latest Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Posted: 16 May 2021 08:33 AM PDT

While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hopes that the escalating violence between Israeli and Palestinian forces doesn’t continue for very long, he acknowledged Sunday morning that he doesn’t foresee an “immediate” end to the conflict.

“Well, we hope that it doesn’t continue very long,” Netanyahu told CBS’ John Dickerson on Face the Nation.” “But we were attacked by Hamas on our national day, Jerusalem Day — unprovoked attacks on Jerusalem and then thousands of rockets and missiles on our cities. And I think any country has to defend itself, has a natural right of self-defense.”

Netanyahu was referring to rockets being fired from the Gaza Strip, territory controlled by Hamas. Those rocket attacks began amid unrest in Jerusalem attributed to a number of causes, including Palestinian complaints about evictions of residents from an Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem and an Israeli raid on the Al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan — all piled upon decades of grievances and terrible memories.

“We’ll do whatever it takes to restore order and quiet and the security of people and deterrence. We’re trying to degrade Hamas’ terrorist abilities and to degrade their will to do this again. So it’ll take some time. I hope it won’t take long, but it’s not immediate,” he said, saying Americans would certainly react the same way if there were attacks on U.S. cities.

Netanyahu also denied reports that he had rejected a truce offered by Egypt, which also borders on Gaza, and accepted by Hamas.

“That’s not what I know,” he said of the suggested truce.

“And, frankly, if Hamas thought that they could just fire rockets and then sit back and enjoy immunity, that’s false. We’re targeting a terrorist organization that is targeting our civilians and hiding behind their civilians, using them as human shields. We’re doing everything we can to hit the terrorists themselves, their rockets, their rocket caches and their arms. But we’re not just going to let them get away with it, and neither would you.”

Facebook braces for showdown with world leaders after Trump ban

Posted: 16 May 2021 03:26 AM PDT

Facebook’s problem with world leaders is about to get a whole lot worse.

In India, the government passed rules to give itself a greater say over what’s posted on social media. In Poland, lawmakers drafted proposals to stop Facebook and others from deleting potentially harmful posts or banning people who broke their community standards. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, the country’s populist president, threatened to do the same after the local supreme court ordered Facebook to ban several of his top allies.

Into that political quagmire steps the so-called Oversight Board: a group of outside experts that demanded Facebook decide within six months if Donald Trump should be allowed back onto its platform. In its ruling, the body made it clear that politicians and other influential users should not be treated any differently compared to everyone else on social media.

"Political leaders do not have a greater right to freedom of expression than other people,” said Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the former Danish prime minister and co-chair of the Oversight Board.

Yet even before the ink is dry on that decision, Facebook is facing a drumbeat of new rules around the world aimed at hobbling its powers to hold political leaders accountable for what they can say to their millions of online followers. Many run counter to the Oversight Board’s claims that all content that breaks the company’s content rules, especially if it comes from senior politicians, should be swiftly removed from the global platform.

The proposals will lead to an inevitable showdown between Facebook and global leaders, many of whom believe the American tech giant has become too powerful in deciding how elected officials can communicate directly with would-be supporters. Countries from Mexico to Turkey want to give politicians, not social media giants, the right to decide on what and who can post online.

That tension has been simmering for years. But the recent Trump ruling has again rekindled the fight over who should have the final say over what is posted on the world’s largest social network. The outside group determined the former U.S. president’s comments around the Capitol Hill riots had broken Facebook’s rules but also chastised the company for its “vague, standardless penalty” for banning him for an indefinite period.

The relationship between Facebook and its Oversight Board — a collection of human rights experts, legal scholars and former politicians — will come to a head in coming months as the expert group is due to judge a new round of claims involving world leaders and their followers. In particular, the Oversight Board is expected to be asked to judge whether other leaders broke the platform’s rules when using it to speak to their supporters.

“At some point, these types of questions are going back to the Board,” said Evelyn Douek, an online free speech expert at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. “If it’s not Trump, it will be another global leader.”

Facebook’s dilemma

The tech giant is acutely aware of the bind it now faces — and the challenges the Oversight Board’s Trump ruling created.

Nick Clegg, the former British deputy prime minister and the company’s chief global lobbyist, told POLITICO that the experts had muddied the water in their decision by both claiming that political speech in democracies should be treated differently so that voters could make informed decisions, and that all content should be treated by the same rules.

“I don’t think they were fully resolved,” he said. “On one hand, they recognized that political speech is rather atypical speech, and on the other hand, they were also saying: but there should be nothing different about politicians compared to others with significant reach. So we have to grapple with that.”

Facebook has until June 4, at the latest, to respond to the experts’ nonbinding recommendations on how to treat content posted by global leaders and other influential users. Those suggestions included greater clarity to all users on how the company made decisions about removing content and an internal audit of the tech giant’s own role in promoting falsehoods around electoral fraud in November’s U.S. election.

Yet Thomas Hughes, the Oversight Board’s director, told POLITICO that the group’s guidance had been clear. Facebook, he said, should treat all content the same, but must also weigh the potential harm of keeping posts online from politicians that may have broken the company’s rules. The key was providing greater transparency on how the social media giant made its decisions on removing or reinstating specific material.

When asked how the group would rule on content flagged from a country with its own social media rules, the former human rights campaigner said the Oversight Board would not shy away from adjudicating against such legislation if it did not comply with existing human rights standards.

Under the group’s bylaws, it cannot take on cases that lead to either criminal liability or “adverse governmental action” against Facebook or the Oversight Board. But Hughes said there was scope to judge content in authoritarian or democratic regimes where governments were trying to suppress opposition.

“If repressive country X decides that a particular user on Facebook shouldn’t criticise the leader for whatever particular reason, and there’s a law that says that, that is not a law the board is going to uphold,” he said without naming any specific countries. “It’s not a sort of law the board is going to say well that’s a really good legitimate restriction on expression that fits with international human rights standards.”

Test cases

It did not take long for Brazil’s Bolsonaro to respond to the Oversight Board’s decision against Trump.

Days after the ruling, the populist leader, whose online swagger and peddling of COVID-19 falsehoods have drawn comparisons to the former U.S. president, announced plans to revamp the country’s internet rules to sanction social media companies that either flag or remove content favorable to the Brazilian president. Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube have previously removed some of Bolsonaro’s posts for promoting misinformation about the ongoing pandemic.

Sérgio Lüdtke, editor of the Comprova Project, a coalition of 24 media outlets that fact-checks content about public policies in Brazil, said the country’s president was likely bluffing on his threats to rewrite Brazil’s rules. But, he added, Bolsonaro was trying to protect his social media accounts, which have tens of millions of followers, ahead of next year’s general election because they were a direct way to communicate with voters increasingly disenchanted with how he’s leading the country.

“To Bolsonaro, it is essential to preserve the immense social capital that these accounts have accumulated in recent years,” he said in an email. “There is a high expectation about what will happen to his accounts since he has made many posts that go against Facebook’s rules.”

It’s not just Brazil.

Last week, the United Kingdom proposed social media laws that include hefty penalties for the largest companies if they don’t take action against illegal content like online extremism and so-called harmful material like misinformation and self-harm videos. British officials, though, included provisions that would stop Facebook and others from removing posts viewed as “democratically important,” including content from politicians and the country’s government.

For Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, countries worldwide are split in their approaches to social media companies and how they should deal with content used to communicate directly with voters.

For some, he said, the focus was on complaining that tech giants should do more to stop the spread of potentially harmful behavior, without passing new legislation to force them to do so.

For others, there was a push to create new rules that would take the final say out of the hands of these tech companies. Yet even those laws do not necessarily answer the question of whether Trump’s posts around the January 6 riots should have been allowed to remain online.

“Politicians are hung up around the fact that Facebook, as a company, had the right to make a decision about Trump’s account,” he said. “They’ve developed an interest around online content just when it starts to affect people like them.”

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