During his Congressional hearings in April, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was interrogated by members of the House and Senate. Because it was evident from their questions that many of the lawmakers were actually clueless about how Facebook works, much time was wasted on Zuckerberg's having to explain the basics of its tools and business model. A select few – among them Senator Ted Cruz -- challenged Zuckerberg about the political slant of his platform, which has led to discrimination against conservative groups and individuals.
Zuckerberg acknowledged that:
"...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 it is a fair concern that people would at least wonder about."
When asked about what Facebook is doing to prevent terrorists from using the platform to recruit and coordinate, Zuckerberg said that 200 of his (25,000) employees monitor such content and activity in 30 languages.
The question that Zuckerberg should have been asked is why organizations and individuals that are designated by the State Department as terrorists are able to open pages on his platform in the first place, let alone continue to maintain those pages, or block their content temporarily, before allowing it to be re-posted. It would have been a particularly relevant query, given the launch in July 2017 of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, announced by Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube. The stated goal of the Forum was to:
"help us continue to make our hosted consumer services hostile to terrorists and violent extremists.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12294/facebook-terrorism
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