SoylentNews

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Today Senate Republicans held a hearing titled “Stifling Free Speech: Technological Censorship and the Public Discourse.” It was the second such hearing to be held in Congress in the past six months — in September, House Republicans put on a similar show, lambasting Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

. . .

To the extent that these hearings have any basis in actual events, as Hirono notes, they tend to involve isolated cases in which some conservative-leaning person or organization is temporarily suspended from a service, or does not appear in search results, or is not being promoted sufficiently by a site’s recommendation features. And while unintentional bias often is baked into algorithms, as this recent study of Facebook’s ad products suggests, no research has ever suggested that Republicans have been disadvantaged on social media platforms.

In fact, as I often like to point out, Fox News typically gets more engagement on Facebook than any other publisher. Still, that’s just one data point. How do partisan pages fare across the social network?

A study today published by Media Matters for America attempts to answer that question. Over 37 weeks, the authors measured engagement — likes, comments, and shares — across left- and right-leaning pages. What did they find?

https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/4/11/18305407/social-network-conservative-bias-twitter-facebook-ted-cruz [theverge.com]

Original Submission