Advisors join Facebook to audit civil rights and alleged conservative bias

Two external advisors are joining Facebook to help the company audit issues of alleged bias.

According to an Axios report, there will be a civil rights audit guided by Laura Murphy, the director of the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union. The other external advisor is former Arizona Republican Senator Jon Kyl. Kyl will lead a partnership to advise the company on conservative bias.

Murphy will gather feedback from civil rights groups while Washington-based law firm Relman, Dane & Colfax will perform an audit on Facebook’s services and internal operations. The firm is prominent in the civil rights sphere, having litigated pivotal cases related to housing, employment and public accommodation discrimination over the last 20 years.

Kyl will examine Facebook’s alleged liberal bias concerns and work with Washington law firm Covington and Burling to audit alleged bias on the platform. Conservative policy think tank The Heritage Foundation will meet with Facebook executives to address bias concerns.

When the bias allegations were first raised in 2016, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post that there was “no evidence” of bias.

Facebook is already making efforts to be more transparent with how it handles content and data. At F8 on May 1st, Zuckerberg announced ways the company plans to give users more power over their data. A couple weeks ago, Facebook invited reporters to join in on one of its regular internal content meetings. Reporters got a close look at how employees tackled complex content decisions. The company is also testing a button to label posts as hate speech, which appeared briefly on the site on May 1st.

This follows the reports that as many as 87 million Facebook users, including over 600,ooo Canadians, had data obtained improperly by Cambridge Analytica. In response, Facebook is restricting its app platform and forcing bad actors off of the platform.