Zuckerberg Faces Reps in Congress: Even More Grilling on "Bias against Conservative News"

Calvin Freiburg : Apr 11, 2018
Lifesitenews.com

Zuckerberg is finding out that complaints of bias aren't just from one or two senators; it's throughout the fabric of America as voiced by our representatives in Congress. The facts seem to speak for themselves: Fox News has seen a 26% drop in Facebook engagement while the left-leaning CNN only saw a 2% decline.

(Washington, DC)—[Lifesitenews.com] Several members of Congress questioned Mark Zuckerberg on whether Facebook manipulates algorithms to suppress conservative content, during the social media pioneer's second day of Capitol Hill testimony. (Photo: Rep. Marsha Blackburn questions Mark Zuckerberg/C-SPAN3/via LifeSiteNews)

Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-TN, asked the Facebook founder point blank, "do you subjectively manipulate your algorithms to prioritize or censor speech?"

"We don't think about what we're doing as censoring speech," Zuckerberg answered. "I think that there are types of content like terrorism, that I think that we all agree we do not want to have on our service. So we build systems that can identify those and can remove that content, and we're very proud of that work."

Blackburn retorted that "Diamond and Silk is not terrorism," referencing the pair of popular conservative video bloggers flagged as "unsafe" by Facebook. Zuckerberg said earlier in the hearing that the judgment was made in error and that Facebook representatives had already contacted Diamond and Silk to reverse it. However, the bloggers say they have not received any follow-up from Facebook since taking the judgment public.

Rep. Steve Scalise, R-LA, also raised the subject, referencing Facebook head of news partnerships Campbell Brown's February declaration that the platform would start "having a point of view" as to what constitutes "quality news."

"I do want to ask you about a study that was done dealing with the algorithm that Facebook uses to describe what is fed to people through the news feed," Scalise continued, "and what they found was after this new algorithm was implemented, that there was a tremendous bias against conservative news and content, and a favorable bias toward liberal content."

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