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Senator Hirono: Conservatives Don’t Face Discrimination On Social Media Because Media Matters Says So

   DailyWire.com
UNITED STATES - SEPTEMBER 30: Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, conducts a news conference with Senate Democrats where they addressed topics including the Supreme Court nominee and health care in the Capitol on Wednesday, September 30, 2020.
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) — who is ranked as one of the most partisan and far-left members of the U.S. Senate  — claimed on Tuesday that social media bias against conservative users does not exist as she complained that publications like Fox News and The Daily Wire perform too well on the platform.

“Mr. Zuckerberg, for the second time in three weeks, you’ve been called before the Senate Committee so my Republican colleagues can beat you up over claims that your platforms are supposedly biased against conservatives. The fact of the matter is that these allegations are completely baseless.”

Hirono said that there was no evidence that social media platforms were biased against conservatives because Media Matters — a leftist organization that smears conservatives and advocates harming conservative news organizations with boycotts — says so.

“Everyone who has systematically looked at the content of social media from Media Matters to the CATO Institute to former Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ) has found absolutely no evidence of anti-conservative bias and data from Crowd Tangle show that far-right content from the likes of Fox News, Ben Shapiro, and Dan Bongino dominates the daily top-10 most engaged pages on Facebook.”

“So all of these allegations about the fact that you hire, or all of your employees are left-of-center, is relevant of nothing, certainly not relevant on some sort of anti-conservative bias in terms of your content moderation,” Hirono claimed. “So, the way I see it, this hearing is a transparent effort by my Republican colleagues to work the refs and unfortunately, in my view, it’s working.”

Politico reported that the report authored by Kyl “doesn’t come to a definitive conclusion about whether bias exists on the platform, but appears designed to quell mounting accusations by GOP leaders.”

Hirono also painted a misleading picture of how conservative content performs on Facebook as she failed to mention that, according to data that Facebook have made public, mainstream media publications, which are typically left-of-center, dominate on Facebook in terms of the number of people who see their content. The data provided by Facebook shows that the following publications are included in Facebook’s top-10 ranking of publishers whose content reaches the most users on the platform: CNN, NBC News, The Washington Post, The New York Times, CBS News, USA Today, People, and NPR. The list also includes Fox News and the New York Post, which are typically more right-of-center publications.

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This report has been updated to include additional information. 

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