Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg heads to Capitol Hill this week to address criticisms regarding his company’s handling of data and privacy.
It’s always difficult to predict congressional hearings and Zuckerberg faces one each in the House and Senate. In an ideal world, here are five questions conservatives would love to see him address in a public forum.
Transparency: Why isn’t Facebook willing to be transparent about what posts it deletes or users it suspends? The site is notorious for tracking data on every person who uses it. It should be easy to create a system that all users can monitor that shows complaints about public figures and public comments and how Facebook handled them.- Employee Bias: What safeguards are in place to prevent Facebook employees from making politically biased decisions about content? Politically active people on both sides of the aisle have accused Facebook of bias against their respective content. But this is a particular concern for conservatives who feel they have been targeted.
- Institutional Bias: Facebook and its leadership have expressed public positions on numerous cultural issues from DACA and gay marriage to guns. How can people who take a different position ever expect fair treatment on the site? These biases play out not just in standard content, but even in advertising policies. Can Facebook claim to be a neutral player?
- Privacy: Will Facebook allow users to permanently delete their information and data from Facebook’s servers? Complaints have arisen about users who claim that Facebook is keeping data on them without their express permission.
- Accountability: How will Facebook be accountable to its publishers who have invested millions of dollars in advertising money to grow their platforms? Facebook has recently made it so posts by publishers make up a smaller percentage of what users encounter in their news feeds, leading to sites like Right Wing News shuttering their operations entirely.
