This time at least, the Facebook employees were overruled by CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the grounds that this would amount to political censorship, but the issue raises the question: Is there a problem of anti-conservative bias in the social media? And if so, what’s the answer?
It should be noted that Trump is not a standard conservative — indeed, many conservatives say he’s not a conservative at all — and plenty of people on the right have denounced his proposed Muslim ban. But this is far from the only instance in which major social media platforms have been accused of political censorship toward right-leaning content.Last May, allegations were made that Facebook had suppressed conservative views from its “trending topics;” while Facebook claimed that its internal investigation found no evidence of systematic suppression, the company also announced that it would modify the process of trending topic selection to minimize the potential for abuse.
During the same month, Canadian conservative activist Lauren Southern was slapped with a 30-day Facebook suspension over — ironically enough — a post complaining about Facebook censorship of conservatives. (The ban was later reversed and blamed on an error.)
