Sen. Lee Blasts Tech Response to Anti-GOP Claims

Responses from Alphabet, Facebook, Squarespace and Twitter about alleged anti-conservative bias are “completely unpersuasive,” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said Thursday. Lee originally wrote the companies asking each to “justify anti-conservative bias in their content moderation process.” Alphabet's Google uses content moderation standards that “are apolitical, unbiased and do not preference one point of view over another,” the company wrote. Twitter doesn’t use “political viewpoints, perspectives, ideology or party affiliation to make any decisions, whether related to automatically ranking content or how we enforce our rules,” it wrote. Facebook also denied undue political influence over its content moderators. Squarespace said many of Lee’s questions don’t apply to the company because it doesn’t have market power or a comments section and doesn’t engage in “content removal coordination with other online platforms or competitors.” Lee responded: “I continue to be concerned about the ideological discrimination going on at these firms and I believe further oversight will be necessary in order to obtain the facts and answers that the American people deserve.”