Hirono railed against the claims, saying that groups from Media Matters to the Cato Institute had concluded that there is no bias against conservative accounts on social media.
Sen. Mazie Hirono took her turn to grill Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook's head Mark Zuckerberg, claiming that anti-conservative bias allegations against the platforms are baseless, and demanding that President Trump be deplatformed once he's out of office.
She railed against the claims, saying that groups from Media Matters to the Cato Institute had concluded that there is no bias against conservative accounts on social media.
Here's Sen. Mazie Hirono saying censorship of conservatives doesn't exist because Media Matters says so. pic.twitter.com/5XZ17WALkE
— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull)
"The fact of the matter is that these allegations are completely baseless. Everyone who has systematically looked at the content on social media, from Media Matters to former Republican Senator John Kyle has found absolutely no evidence of anti-conservative bias."
She said that "far-right content" dominates the most engaged pages on Facebook. For Hirono, this is evidence that there's no issue with the lack of ideological diversity among social media employees.
Instead, Hirono blamed the existence of the hearing at all on her Republican colleagues, who are trying to "work the refs."
"And unfortunately," Hirono said, "in my view it is working."
In her defense of this remark, she noted that Instagram had removed "strikes" against Donald Trump Jr. on that platform, and other notable reversals.
Instead of the necessity of reversals being evidence of an anti-conservative bias, Hirono uses the fact that there was reversals at all as evidence that there is no bias.
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