How Facebook Can Prove It Doesn’t Discriminate Against Conservatives

During last week’s congressional hearings investigating the accessing of data from 87 million Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica, several Republican lawmakers worried that companies like Facebook might have a “liberal bias” in the way it enforces its rules and moderates content posted by users. But the deeper claims of censorship were somewhat misleading: Research by ThinkProgress suggests that video content from across the political spectrum was made less visible after recent changes to Facebook’s algorithms. Facebook, like many other social media platforms, is facing increasing scrutiny about potential bias in the way it makes decisions about what people are allowed to post online and what content becomes visible. They check the content against a version of the company’s highly detailed internal policies, which are not made available to the public, like what specific phrasing targeting which specific groups would constitute a violation.