Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has fallen under scrutiny from a US Senate committee over the alleged political bias of the site\u2019s Trending news feature. A GOP senator questioned Facebook\u2019s practice of filtering news, accusing it of\u00a0\u201cmisleading\u201d<\/em>\u00a0the public.<\/p>\n The chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, Senator John Thune, has asked Zuckerberg to answer questions regarding allegations that Facebook\u2019s team prevented conservative news stories from appearing in its Trending news section.<\/p>\n \u201cIf Facebook presents its Trending Topics section as the result of a neutral, objective algorithm, but it is in fact subjective and filtered to support or suppress particular political viewpoints, Facebook\u2019s assertion that it maintains \u2018a platform for people and representatives from across the political spectrum\u2019 misleads the public,\u201d<\/em> Thune wrote<\/a>,\u00a0stressing Facebook\u2019s \u201cenormous influence on users\u2019 perceptions of current events, including political perspectives.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n Zuckerberg has until May 24 at the latest to provide his response for the committee\u2019s inquiry. In his letter, Thune has also asked the social network giant\u2019s CEO to \u201carrange for your staff, including employees for Trending Topics, to brief committee staff on the issue.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Thune\u2019s questions range from covering Facebook\u2019s organizational structure to \u201csteps for determining included topics\u201d into its news curation to the network\u2019s management probe into claims about its team\u2019s politically motivated filtering of news.<\/p>\n \u201cHave Facebook news curators in fact manipulated the content of the Trending Topics section, either by targeting news stories related to conservative views for exclusion or by injecting non-trending content?\u201d<\/em> Thune asked.<\/p>\n In another question, the GOP senator asked what would be Facebook\u2019s next \u201csteps to hold the responsible individuals accountable\u201d<\/em> should the allegations be \u201csubstantiated.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The senator also questioned Facebook\u2019s statement issued Monday, following Gizmodo\u2019s report exposing the \u201cnews curator\u201d<\/em> removing right-wing topics such as Mitt Romney, Rand Paul and the Conservative Political Action Conference from making the site\u2019s Trending news list.<\/p>\n Facebook rebuffed the allegations saying that its \u201cguidelines do not permit the suppression of one viewpoint or another or one news outlet or another.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cHow does Facebook determine compliance with these guidelines,\u201d<\/em> Thune asked.<\/p>\n Thune requested that Facebook provide a list of stories removed from the Trending Topics list since January 2014, along with whether the company has been monitoring such decisions. He asked the company to als share statistics about how many of the injected stories had not in fact been trending.<\/p>\n Facebook has released a statement in response to the committee\u2019s inquiry, stating that it \u201clooks forward to addressing\u201d<\/em> Thune\u2019s questions. The company has vowed to \u201ctake immediate steps to fix\u201d<\/em> its operational practices if they are \u201cinadequate.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The Senate Committee\u2019s inquiry came a day after anonymous former Facebook employees accused the social media network of bias in news reporting.<\/p>\n \u201cDepending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,\u201d<\/em> a former curator told Gizmodo. \u201cI\u2019d come on shift and I\u2019d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn\u2019t be trending because either the curator didn\u2019t recognize the news topic, or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cI believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,\u201d<\/em> he added.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Via RT<\/a>. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission or license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Facebook\u2019s Mark Zuckerberg is facing a US Senate inquiry over claims that the social network has been filtering conservative news. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has fallen under scrutiny from a US Senate committee over the alleged political bias of the site\u2019s Trending news feature. A GOP senator questioned Facebook\u2019s practice of filtering news, accusing it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":242809,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-242808","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242808"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242808\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n![\"\u00a9](\"https:\/\/cdn.rt.com\/files\/2016.05\/thumbnail\/572d1f6ac361888f568b45a5.jpg\")
\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n