Name: Ted Cruz Questions Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg About Political Censorship
Uploaded: 2018-04-10
Duration: 4 min 16 s
Description: And if the site had a liberal bias.

There are a great many Americans who I think are deeply concerned that Facebook and other tech companies are engaged in a pervasive pattern of bias and political censorship. There have been numerous instances with Facebook In May of 2016, Gizmodo reported that Facebook had purposefully and routinely suppressed conservative stories from trending news, including stories about CPAC, including stories about Mitt Romney, including stories about the Lois Lerner IRS scandal, including stories about Glenn Beck. In addition to that, Facebook has Initially shut down the Chick- Fil- A appreciation day page, has blocked a post of a Fox News reporter, has blocked over two dozen Catholic pages, and most recently, blocked Trump supporter's Diamond and Silk's page With 1. 2 million Facebook followers. After determining their content and brand were, quote unsafe to the community. To a great many Americans, that appears to be a pervasive pattern of political bias, do you agree with that assessment? Senator, let me say a few things about this. First, I understand where that concern is coming from, because Facebook and the tech industry are located in Silicon Valley, which is an extremely left- leaning place. And this is actually a concern that I have and that I try to root out in the company is making sure that we don't have Any bias in the work that we do. And I think that it is a fair concern that people would at least wonder about it. So let me ask this question. Are you aware of any ad or page that has been taken down from Planned Parenthood? Senator, I'm not, but let me just. Can I finish? How about moveon. org? Sorry? How about MoveOn. org? I'm not specifically aware of those cases. How about any Democratic candidate for office? I'm not specifically aware. I mean, I'm not sure. In your testimony, you say that you have 15 to 20, 000 people working on security and content review Do you know the political orientation of those 15 to 20 thousand people engage in content review? No senator we do not generally ask people about their political orientation when they are joining the company. So as CEO have you ever made hiring or firing decisions base on political positions or what candidates they supported? No. Why was Pomerlocki fired? That is a specifc personel matter that seems like it would be inappropriate to speak to -> You just made a specific representation that you didn't make decisions based on political views. Well -> Is that accurate? I can commit that it was not because of a political view. Do you know of those 15 to 20 thousand people engaged in content review How many, if any, have ever supported financially a Republican candidate for office? Senator, I do not know that. Your testimony says, it is not enough that we just connect people. We have to make sure those connections are positive. It says we have to make sure people aren't using their voice to hurt people or spread misinformation. We have a responsibility not just to build tools, to make sure those tools are used for good. Mr. Zuckerberg, do you feel it's your responsibility to assess users whether they are good and positive connections or ones that those 15 to 20 thousand people deem unacceptable or deplorable. Senator are you asking me personally? Facebook. Senator I think that there are a number of things that we would all agree are clearly bad. Foreign interference in our elections, terrorism, self harm. Those are things. I'm talking about censorship. Well I think that you would probably agree that we should remove terrorist propoganda from the service. So that I agree, I think is clearly bad activity that we want to get down. And we generally proud of how well we do with that. What I can say, and I do wanna get this said before the end here, is that I'm very committed to making sure that Facebook is a platform for all ideas. That is a very important founding principle of what we do, and we are proud of the discourse and the different ideas that people can share on the service. And that is something that as long as I'm running the company. I'm gonna be committed to making sure is the case. Thank you.