Acknowledging that “many conservatives don’t trust that [Facebook] surfaces content without a political bias,” Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg met with about a dozen prominent right-wingers Wednesday at the company’s California headquarters.
The meeting — on the fourth anniversary of the day Facebook issued its initial public offering and became a public company — was closed to reporters, but in a statement afterward, Zuckerberg noted that “Donald Trump has more fans on Facebook than any other presidential candidate. And Fox News drives more interactions on its Facebook page than any other news outlet in the world. It’s not even close.”
Facebook has been under pressure since the tech news site Gizmodo, citing an unnamed former employee, reported May 9 that conservative news sources had been regularly demoted and that liberal sources had been promoted in its “Trending Topics” section — the box to the right of a user’s main news feed, packaged with birthday notices and invitations.
Zuckerberg promised Wednesday that Facebook would always be “a platform for all ideas, saying, “It doesn’t make sense for our mission or our business to suppress political content or prevent anyone from seeing what matters most to them.”
In a signal of just how important Facebook is to political movements, including the conservative, many of those at the meeting announced and discussed their attendance on Facebook.
[Source: NBC]
