Mark Zuckerberg is holding meetings with conservatives this week to address Facebook news bias claims
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is to hold a meeting later this week with leading conservatives to address claims that Facebook has been expunging right wing news from its Trending section.
Among those invited to discuss the allegations on Wednesday (18 May) are co-host of Fox News' The Five show Dana Perino, media personality Glenn Beck and Zac Moffat, co-founder of Targeted Victory, a media buying tech firm which aims to make the process more transparent.
The move follows a statement released by Zuckerberg last week in which he said his company had found "no evidence" to indicate that its team of news curators were "blacklisting" right wing stories, as alleged by former staff in a story first published in Gizmodo.
The whistleblowers claim they were instructed to artificially "inject" selected stories into the Trending news module, which sits on Facebook's homepage, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion
In light of the claims senior senate republican John Thume, issued a request for the social giant to reveal the processes used to select Trending content.
Commenting on Wednesday's meeting, former news host Beck took to Facebook to lament. "It would be interesting to look him (Zuckerberg) in the eye as he explains," he wrote.
"While they are a private business and I support their right to run it any way they desire without government interference, it would be wonderful if a tool like face book [sic] INDEPENDENTLY CHOSE to hold up Freedom of speech and freedom of association as a corporate principle."
63 per cent of Facebook's billion-strong userbase regard the site as a source of news according to figures from Pew Research.