WASHINGTON – The executive director of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a nonprofit legal advocacy group that has defended key civil rights cases, has been appointed to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
Speaker Paul Ryan of the U.S. House of Representatives named Kristina Arriaga de Bucholz, a Cuban-American, to join eight other nongovernmental commissioners on the panel. The members review religious-freedom violations abroad and make policy recommendations to the President, Secretary of State, and Congress. Arriaga replaces Robert P. George of Princeton University.
Mark Zuckerberg and his massive social-media site Facebook have come under strong criticism for allegedly suppressing stories of interest for conservative readers from its influential "trending" news section. Facebook has roughly 1.6 billion users worldwide, 167 million of whom are in the United States. Its "trending" section is therefore a powerful political influence.
Zuckerberg has denied the charges, and he will meet Wednesday with a handful of conservatives to discuss allegations that Facebook's "news curators" have manipulated its list of stories. The way it works at Facebook is that this powerful group of curators, or editors, who have access to a ranked list of trending topics generated by the company's algorithms, control the content of the trending-news section. In effect, these curators exercise gatekeeping powers, which amount to political news-making powers that are transmitted to Facebook's massive audience. Even The New York Times published an article this week titled "Social media finds new role as news and entertainment curator."
