The co-founder of Facebook said Tuesday that the social media giant has implemented a system in which the company creates metrics to rank news sites — and with that, impact the presence of content from such outlets.

“We put [those data] into the system, and it is acting as a boost or a suppression, and we’re going to dial up the intensity of that over time,” Mark Zuckerberg said, as BuzzFeed reported. “We feel like we have a responsibility to further [break] down polarization and find common ground.”

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The media outlets are being ranked on “trustworthiness,” according to reports. On the surface, that sounds like a good way to make sure people are reading only accurate information — but there are a couple of problems with this.

First, the social media giant does not specify what it considers “trustworthy” in a news site. This may merely be an excuse for the company to throttle content based on political views the site creators like and don’t like.

Facebook first started changing its news algorithms back in January 2017, which resulted in a drop in traffic for some news sites, according to The Gateway Pundit.

Back in March of this year, Western Journal conducted a study that showed how Facebook’s latest algorithm change has impacted conservative and liberal sites differently. It reported that changes bumped up web traffic for liberal sites by 2 percent — while sites on the Right saw their traffic from the social media giant drop by a combined 14 percent.

Since Facebook has lacked transparency in its changes and the changes seem to be impacting conservative sites more than liberal ones, there’s reason to believe the social media company’s actions have been — and will continue to be — politically motivated. Facebook itself has even recognized in the past that this bias could become an issue.

The social media site Axios reported that Facebook will launch an internal investigation to see if there is a conservative bias on its part. The audit will be led by former Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and a team of investigators from the Covington and Burling law firm. When the group completes its investigation, it will offer Facebook feedback on how to solve any bias problems. Plus, The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank, is set to meet with Facebook executives next week, according to the same report, concerning similar bias concerns.

“Getting outside feedback will help us improve over time — ensuring that we can more effectively serve the people on Facebook,” Facebook’s vice president of global policy, Joel Kaplan, told Gizmodo.

It’s unclear if Facebook will actually do anything about conservative censorship — even when pressed on the issue — but at least conservatives have gotten Facebook to publicly admit it is an issue.

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If Facebook keeps up what it’s doing, especially with these new changes, then it risks alienating half of the country. As a private company that needs to stay relevant — that is not a good thing. But maybe Facebook won’t recognize this until conservatives and right-of-center thinkers begin abandoning the platform.

Tom Joyce is a freelance writer from the South Shore of Massachusetts. He covers sports, pop culture, and politics and has contributed to The Federalist, Newsday, ESPN, and other outlets.

(photo credit, homepage image: Mark Zuckerberg, CC BY 2.0, by Silverisdead; photo credit, article image: Mark Zuckerberg, CC BY 2.0, by Robert Scoble)