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Zuckerberg CONFESSES Facebook has 15,000 employess enacting CENSORSHIP on the site

By from net, Posted in Communications / Censorship / Freedom

TED CRUZ grills Zuckerberg over https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WitXOVjBkkw

https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/65175/zuckerberg-admits-hes-developing-artificial-intelligence-to-censor.html

https://www.google.com/#q=section+230+cda

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfYFgl3oEr4

A number of Republicans repeatedly questioned Zuckerberg about another the fact Facebook is deliberately suppressing conservative news and opinions through recent changes to its News Feed feature.

"After this new algorithm was implemented, there was a tremendous bias against conservative news and content and a favorable bias towards liberal content," asserted Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., the House majority whip. "Was there a directive to put a bias in?"

Several other Republicans, such as Rep. Billy Long of Missouri, invoked two women named Lynette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, better known by their internet monikers, Diamond and Silk. The sisters have acquired a large following as black supporters of President Donald Trump but allegedly were judged "unsafe to the community" by some Facebook staffers recently. That diagnosis is clearly off.

Facebook's critics make a very convincing case that the social media colossus is deliberately censoring conservative points of view while claiming to be cracking down on fake news.

Seven congressional Republicans challenged Zuckerberg on the topic but the only ones who tried to rely on more than just anecdotes were Scalise and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.

Cruz began his inquiry to Zuckerberg by asking if the CEO considered Facebook to be a "neutral public forum," based on the notion that the 1996 Communications Decency Act forces website operators to refrain from moderating user-generated content to avoid legal liability for it.

Cruz then referenced a May 2016 article from Gizmodo that discussed allegations from a handful of Facebook contractors who claimed the company had skewed the "trending" section of the News Feed. "Facebook had purposely and routinely suppressed conservative stories from trending news," Cruz said.

That a Republican senator would cite the Gizmodo piece is no surprise. But Cruz seemed completely unaware that Zuckerberg was very familiar with that story. As Wired's Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein reported in February, the public accusation that Facebook was trying to harm conservatives struck panic into upper management. Afraid of telling the truth - that conservative users wanted to read low-quality and fabricated news stories - executives instead decided to grovel to Republicans:

When Gizmodo published its story about political bias on the Trending Topics team in May, the ­article went off like a bomb in Menlo Park. It quickly reached millions of readers and, in a delicious irony, appeared in the Trending Topics module itself. But the bad press wasn't what really rattled Facebook - it was the letter from John Thune, a Republican US senator from South Dakota, that followed the story's publication. Thune chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, which in turn oversees the Federal Trade Commission, an agency that has been especially active in investigating Facebook. The senator wanted Facebook's answers to the allegations of bias, and he wanted them promptly.

The Thune letter put Facebook on high alert. The company promptly dispatched senior Washington staffers to meet with Thune's team.

Facebook decided, too, that it had to reach out to the entire American right wing, much of which was raging about the company's perfidy. And so, just over a week after the story ran, Facebook scrambled to invite a group of 17 prominent Republicans out to Menlo Park. The list included television hosts, radio stars, think tankers, and an adviser to the Trump campaign.

According to a Facebook employee involved in planning the meeting, part of the goal was to bring in a group of conservatives who were certain to fight with one another. They made sure to have libertarians who wouldn't want to regulate the platform and partisans who would. Another goal, according to the employee, was to make sure the attendees were "bored to death" by a technical presentation after Zuckerberg and Sandberg had addressed the group.