The Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign want Facebook and Twitter to explain how they plan to fight political bias in the upcoming election.
RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey asking questions about new policies implemented by the social media companies.
“We recognize that Facebook and Twitter operate in liberal corporate cultures. However, rampant political bias is inappropriate for a widely used public forum,” McDaniel and Parscale wrote. “What’s more, the consequences to our democratic society are profound. This is why special attention is necessary to address issues such as Facebook’s use of liberal organizations to fact-check content, the access to user profiles it gives to some employees, and Twitter’s manipulation of content that appears for the site’s users.”
McDaniel and Parscale said they are worried “about potential misuse” of a new system employed by Facebook to rank news organizations based on their level of user trust, as well as Facebook’s work with a third party to encourage voter registration.
The two said that while they acknowledge the latter is “an admirable task in theory,” they are calling for transparency in how Facebook decides which users see these advertisements in their news feeds.
“This is to make sure that the new feature does not become essentially an in-kind contribution to liberal candidates,” McDaniel and Parscale wrote.
Both Twitter and Facebook have faced allegations that they suppress conservative speech by keeping conservative news stories out of users’ news feeds on Facebook and by purging popular conservative Twitter users of followers.
The two platforms have taken steps aimed at combating the spread of “fake news” in users’ feeds, and Facebook announced this month it will examine allegations of liberal bias.
McDaniel and Parscale are asking Facebook to explain how they plan to ensure that all content on the sites is treated equally, safeguard users’ access to “fair content” on the platforms, and ensure conservative voices and news are no longer stifled.
“[W]e ask for your assurances that transparency, neutrality, and protection of all speech will be core tenets of Facebook and Twitter operations, now and in the future,” McDaniel and Parscale wrote.
