<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="center">The tech website, Gizmodo recently reported that Facebook purposely censors the conservative perspective. A few former employees who were news curators of the social media site admitted to being instructed to do so.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">&ldquo;Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,&rdquo; said the former curator who wanted to remain anonymous to Gizmodo. &ldquo;I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news, I&rsquo;d come on shift and I&rsquo;d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn&rsquo;t be trending because either the curator didn&rsquo;t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.&rdquo;</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">After being appalled by these claims, Senate Commerce Committee chairman John Thune wrote a letter to the social media company&rsquo;s founder, Mark Zuckerberg.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">&ldquo;This week, the press is reporting claims by former Facebook staffers that employees of Facebook routinely suppressed conservative political viewpoints on the social network,&rdquo; said Thune. &ldquo;If Facebook presents its Trending Topics section as the result of a neutral, objective algorithm, but it is in fact subjective and filtered to support or suppress particular political viewpoints, Facebook&rsquo;s assertion that it maintains a &lsquo;platform for people and perspectives from across the political spectrum&rsquo; misleads the public.&rdquo;</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Thune also insisted to know how Facebook&rsquo;s news is curated for its users. &ldquo;Facebook must answer these serious allegations and hold those responsible to account if there has been political bias in the dissemination of trending news,&rdquo; said Thune.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Thune condemned Facebook for the alleged censoring stating that &ldquo;is an abuse of trust and inconsistent with the values of an open Internet.&rdquo;</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It seems also suspicious that Clinton has received the most donations (a total of $100,000) from Facebook employees than any other presidential candidate. Tom Stocky, Facebook&rsquo;s vice president of product management who is responsible for the &ldquo;Trending News&rdquo; section, contributed $2,700 to the Clinton campaign in October. This was the maximum amount that could be given by an individual donor.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Stocky has continued to deny the allegations. &ldquo;Facebook does not allow or advise our reviewers to systematically discriminate against sources of any ideological origin and we&rsquo;ve designed our tools to make that technically not feasible,&rdquo; he claimed. &ldquo;At the same time, our reviewers&rsquo; actions are logged and reviewed, and violating our guidelines is a fireable offense,&rsquo; said Stocky.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The senate is not taking these allegations lightly and will be doing a full investigation on these claims. ;</p>