Facebook Inc. chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg met with political conservatives to explain how the social network comes up with its trending, seeking to quell concerns that liberal-leaning news and sources were favoured by the company’s editors.
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Wednesday’s meeting came after tech blog Gizmodo reported last week that Facebook used self-employed contractors who hand-picked news items to display on users’ “Trending Topics” box on the upper-right corner.
“I know many conservatives don’t trust that our platform surfaces content without a political bias”, Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. “They want to make sure they’re getting a fair shot, and I think the conversation is going to be about what’s the role in data versus the role in people curating the content and how does human judgment decide are these conservative stories really getting the exposure they deserve”, Anderson said.
“I will tell you this, from the mood of the meeting, they definitely don’t think this is a joke”, said Perino.
Facebook already denied the allegations of bias and said they started an investigation on the issue.
According to the BBC, among those who traveled to Facebook headquarters were conservative commenter Glenn Beck, Fox News analyst and George W. Bush press secretary Dana Perino, Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint, and Donald Trump adviser Barry Bennett.
“Silicon Valley has a reputation for being liberal”.
A-list conservative commentators and leaders did a lot of talking and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did a lot of listening at an unusual meeting on Wednesday afternoon. A report in technology website Gizmodo accused Facebook of editorial bias against conservative news organisations which led to a call for a Congressional inquiry from Senator John Thune (Rep) from South Dakota and the chair of US Senate Commerce Committee which has jurisdiction over media issues.
Others attendees included Donald Trump adviser Barry Bennett; Jim DeMint, a former Republican senator from SC and now president of the Heritage Foundation; American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks and Mitt Romney’s former digital director, Zac Moffatt. “I hear fearful voices calling for building walls and distancing people they label as others”, the Facebook boss said. The world’s largest social network is still biased, they say, even if that bias sometimes happens unconsciously. And Fox News drives more interactions on its Facebook page than any other news outlet in the world.
Fox News-parent 21st Century Fox and News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, were until mid-2013 part of the same company. Sixty-percent of his donations during the 2014 midterm elections went to Republicans and 40 percent to Democrats.
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Arthur Brooks, president of the nonprofit American Enterprise Institute, wrote in a Facebook note, that those at the company “clearly understand that conservative Americans were frustrated and angry to read that Facebook staff might have been discriminating against trending topics that favored the conservative outlook”. “But he also said the company would improve”.
