Cruz relied on two other approaches, both of them faulty. He began his inquiry to Zuckerberg by asking if the CEO considered Facebook to be a “neutral public forum,” apparently based on the notion that the 1996 Communications Decency Act forces website operators to refrain from moderating user-generated content to avoid legal liability for it. This is completely false. Neither the law itself nor any court opinion about it has ever utilized the phrase. In fact, if you search Google for the phrase “neutral public forum” and ignore all pages with Cruz and Zuckerberg’s names on them, you get zero results.

Rather than point out how ill-informed his congressional critics were, however, Zuckerberg sat patiently in his witness chair, repeatedly saying that he did not want Facebook to engage in political bias and that he continually strove to avoid it.

After his “neutral public forum” gambit, Cruz then referenced a May 2016 article from Gizmodo that discussed allegations from a handful of Facebook contractors who claimed the company had skewed the “trending” section of the News Feed. “Facebook had purposely and routinely suppressed conservative stories from trending news,” Cruz said.

That a Republican senator would cite the Gizmodo piece is no surprise. But Cruz seemed completely unaware that Zuckerberg was very familiar with that story. As Wired’s Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein reported in February, the public accusation that Facebook was trying to harm conservatives struck panic into upper management. Afraid of telling the truth — that conservative users wanted to read low-quality and fabricated news stories — executives instead decided to grovel to Republicans:

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/04/republicans-reveal-bizarre-facebook-obsessions-mark-zuckerberg-hearings/