The United States Senate Commerce Committee has issued a please explain demand to Facebook, Inc. after it was alleged that the company censored conservative news in its trending news list.

A letter from the Chairman of the committee, Senator John Thune, asked Facebook to detail the steps it was taking to investigate the allegation, and to provide records of any articles its employees had excluded or added.

In addition, Senator Thune also asked whether the curators had “in fact manipulated the content.”

“If there’s any level of subjectivity associated with it, or if, as reports have suggested that there might have been, an attempt to suppress conservative stories or keep them from trending and get other stories out there, I think it’s important for people to know that,” Senator Thune told The New York Times. “That’s just a matter of transparency and honesty, and there shouldn’t be any attempt to mislead the American public.”

The move against Facebook follows an expose from the usually hard core left-wing tech site Gizmodo which revealed Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers, and that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the section even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.

In addition the report also claimed that workers were instructed to artificially add stories into the trending news list even if they were unpopular topics that weren’t trending at all.

Facebook subsequently denied the report, stating that they were “entirely neutral concerning politics,” and that their “guidelines do not permit the suppression of political perspectives. Nor do they permit the prioritization of one viewpoint over another or one news outlet over another.”

Bias

The reason why the allegations are so easy to believe is the fact that Facebook already acts in a bias fashion, regularly deleting Groups on the service that don’t conform with its social justice warrior agenda.

Coupled to this was news that Facebook staff openly discussed using Facebook resources to stop Donald Trump being elected President; Founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg may have publicly said no to that request, but it’s representative of not only the power that Facebook wields, but the political bias of many of its staff and their willingness to censor and manipulate the service for their own political desires.

Facebook said in a statement that they were happy to respond to the Senator’s questions.

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