Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said after meeting with conservative leaders Wednesday that suppressing one political side doesn’t make sense for his company’s bottom line. On the same day conservative news stories started trending on the social media site.
On Wednesday, the Facebook founder posted on his page that conservatives are a huge part of the success of their business. He said that not only does Donald Trump lead all the other presidential candidates in followers, but Fox News drives more traffic than all other news sites.
“Silicon Valley has a reputation for being liberal,” Zuckerberg admitted. “But the Facebook community includes more than 1.6 billion people of every background and ideology — from liberal to conservative and everything in between.”
“Our community’s success depends on everyone feeling comfortable sharing anything they want,” he added. “It doesn’t make sense for our mission or our business to suppress political content or prevent anyone from seeing what matters most to them.”
“The reality is, conservatives and Republicans have always been an important part of Facebook,” the CEO said “Donald Trump has more fans on Facebook than any other presidential candidate. And Fox News drives more interactions on its Facebook page than any other news outlet in the world. It’s not even close.”
Immediately following the meeting people started noticing that the top trending stories on the website were all conservative news stories, from Megyn Kelly’s interview with Trump to reports on the Second Amendment.
Well someone flipped a switch at Facebook. pic.twitter.com/AK8wJZ15hp
— Jimmy (@JimmyPrinceton) May 18, 2016
The meeting came about following a report in Gizmodo that accused the website of suppressing conservative news stories.