Senators Demand Answers on Claims of Facebook Censorship

GOP Senate lawmakers are demanding answers from Facebook over its alleged bias toward conservative news.
 
The investigation comes after a former Facebook employee admitted to the tech blog Gizmodo that they routinely suppressed conservative news from the "trending topics" section.
 
In a letter, Sen. John Thune, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, asked the tech giant to answer questions about its news curation practices.
 
"If there's any level of subjectivity associated with it, or if, as reports have suggested that there might have been an attempt to suppress conservative stories or keep them from trending and get other stories out there, I think it's important for people to know that," the South Dakota Republican told reporters on Tuesday. 
 
"That's just a matter of transparency and honesty, and there shouldn't be any attempt to mislead the American public," he said.

Facebook says there's no evidence to support such allegations.

"There are rigorous guidelines in place for the review team to ensure consistency and neutrality," Facebook Vice President Tom Stocky wrote in a post.

He added that the guidelines don't permit political perspectives to be suppressed or one viewpoint or outlet to be prioritized over another.

But a former Facebook worker told Gizmodo employees of the tech giant prevented stories about the conservative CPAC, Mitt Romney and Rand Paul from appearing on the site, despite the fact that they were trending among users on Facebook.

According to Gizmodo, several former Facebook "news curators," as they were known internally, also said "they were instructed to artificially 'inject' selected stories into the trending news module even if they weren't popular enough to warrant inclusion -- or in some cases weren't trending at all."

"Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending," the former curator told Gizmodo.  "I'd come on shift, and I'd discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn't be trending because either the curator didn't recognize the news topics or it was likely they had a bias against Ted Cruz."

Gizmodo reported that the former worker made note of which stories that were suppressed, such as "former IRS official Lois Lerner, popular conservative news maker The Drudge Report and former Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, who was murdered in 2013.