WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers was one among a host of legislators to question Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the U.S. House Energy Commerce Committee on Wednesday.
The committee comes after the discovery of data breach by Cambridge Analytica scandal, which led to the misuse of data belonging to 87 million Facebook users.
McMorris Rodgers addressed issues surrounding censorship of certain news content, and asked how Facebook will take steps to ensure that "religious or conservative content" is treated fairly.
“There’s an issue of content discrimination and it’s not unique to Facebook. There’s a number of high-profile examples of edge providers engaging in blocking and censoring religious and conservative political content,” she said.
She cited a recent statement from Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai: “Edge providers routinely block or discriminate against content they don’t like.”
An edge provider is a website, web service, application, or online content hosting or content delivery service that customers connect to over the Internet.
“How would you respond to this allegation, and what is Facebook doing to ensure viewers are being treated fairly and objectively by content reviewers?” she continued.
This was Zuckerberg’s response: “Congresswoman, the principle that we’re a platform all ideas is something that I care very deeply about. I’m worried about bias and we take a number of steps to make sure that none of the changes that we make are targeted in any kinds of bias way. I’d be happy to follow up with you and go into more detail on that because I agree that this is a serious issue.”
\McMorris Rodgers also referenced a recent incident where Facebook blocked a Catholic university’s ad featuring Jesus on the cross on Easter.
She said it is “deeply disturbing” that this happened on the social media platform, and asked why the content was deemed “shocking, sensational or excessively violent” enough to deem censorship.
McMorris Rodgers added that Facebook has since apologized and said the ad did not violate terms of service.
“How can users know that their content is being viewed and judged according to objective standards?” she asked.
“We make a relatively small percent of mistakes in content review but that’s too many. This is an area where we need to improve,” Zuckerberg replied.
“What I will say is that I wouldn’t extrapolate from a few examples to assuming that the overall system is biased. I get how people could look at that and draw that overall conclusion, but I don’t think that reflects the way we are trying to build the system or what we have seen,” he continued.