The left thinks Mark Zuckerberg escaped danger in Congress. The right sees it very differently.

Facebook should take conservatives' bias claims more seriously. Its survival is at stake.

Mark Zuckerberg.
(Image credit: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

Facebook doesn't seem any closer to data privacy regulation, much less getting broken up, after CEO Mark Zuckerberg's two-day visit to Capitol Hill than before he came. That's why Facebook stock rose so sharply during Zuckerberg's testimony to the Senate and House. Investors saw the same thing everyone did: A smart, if slightly robotic, corporate chieftain easily answering or swatting away questions from tech-illiterate politicians. If Congress has only a tenuous grasp of how the social media platform's ad-driven business model works, it's probably not very likely Democrats and Republicans can agree on significant new rules constraining it anytime soon.

But as Team Facebook analyzes their boss's performance, they should give special focus to his questioning by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). Cruz used his five minutes to grill Zuckerberg about his concern that "Facebook and other tech companies are engaged in a pervasive pattern of bias and political censorship." Among the examples Cruz cited: Facebook suppressing conservative stories from trending news in 2016, temporarily shutting down a Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day page in 2012, and blocking the Facebook page of President Trump supporters and video bloggers Diamond and Silk.

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James Pethokoukis

James Pethokoukis is the DeWitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where he runs the AEIdeas blog. He has also written for The New York Times, National Review, Commentary, The Weekly Standard, and other places.