Trump camp, RNC demand tech giants come clean on censorship

Donald Trump speaking at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona, in June 2016 (Gage Skidmore, Wikimedia Commons)

Charging Facebook and Twitter live in "a liberal bubble," President Trump's re-election campaign manager and the Republican National Committee have sent a letter to the tech giants demanding that they acknowledge their censorship of conservative users.

Trump's 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale, wants Facebook and Twitter to "understand what's happening" and exercise "transparency," he explained to "Fox & Friends" Thursday, Breitbart News reported.

Parscale noted Facebook made algorithm changes that reduced the reach of Trump's campaign posts on Facebook in 2016 by as much as 40 percent.

Joining Parscale on "Fox & Friends," RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said social media censorship was a top issue for conservatives.

"It's a legitimate fear, and I hear it all the time as we're traveling the country. People are very concerned that conservative voices are going to be suppressed on social media," McDaniel said.

She said it's important to "make sure that conservative ideals and principles are allowed on these social media platforms, and [that] there's not a thought police coming from Silicon Valley."

In their letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Parscale and McDaniel said they "are alarmed by numerous allegations that Facebook has blocked content from conservative journalists and groups, and Twitter has hidden such content from conservative users' followers."

They pointed out that in 2016, former Facebook workers claimed they manipulated the "trending" section to exclude news tailored to conservative users, despite those topics trending on their own.

"A former trending news curator admitted in an interview that nearly all members of the trending news teams identified as liberal – and had the authority to approve topics," they wrote. "Moreover, some Facebook employees in 2016 reportedly pushed to ban then-candidate Donald Trump's Facebook posts and label them as hate speech."

They also noted conservative web personalities "Diamond & Silk" told Congress they were deemed "unsafe to the community," apparently because of their political views.

Conservative Twitter users, in addition, have accused the company of purging thousands of their followers to stem "fake news" content.

"We recognize that Facebook and Twitter operate in liberal corporate cultures. However, rampant political bias is inappropriate for a widely used public forum," Parscale and McDaniel said.

Read the full story ›