A U.S. Senate committee sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg on May 10 demanding answers after former Facebook employees claimed conservative stories were downplayed in the site’s “trending” section.
In the letter, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation asked Zuckerberg if his news curators practiced “politically motivated manipulation.”
Former Facebook employees who worked from mid-2014 to December 2015 told Gizmodo that the social media platform, headed by Mark Zuckerberg, routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the “trending” news section.
A journalist who worked for Facebook told Gizmodo that employees averted stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, politicians Mitt Romney and Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from showing up in the section, even though they were organically trending.
Various former Facebook “news curators” claim they were ordered to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending section, even though they weren’t popular enough to be included or weren’t trending at all.
