Some publishing executives, who attended a private meeting last week, are arguing that Facebook is overly deferential to conservative news outlets, The Wall Street Journal is reporting.
The meeting came as officials from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are set to testify before the House Judiciary Committee to discuss how content is displayed on their site. Facebook has held a number of meetings in recent weeks to discuss the issue.
According to the newspaper, BuzzFeed Editor in Chief Ben Smith had complained at the recent meeting that of the dozen or so outlets represented, there were six conservative-leaning publications.
Smith said the ratio indicated Facebook had a fundamental misconception of the news industry, the newspaper said. He noted Facebook appeared to believe that publications like The New York Times and others needed to be balanced by right-leaning opinion outlets.
Smith was particularly critical of The Daily Caller and claimed other conservative outlets held higher standards.
Lydia Polgreen, editor in chief of HuffPost also criticized The Daily Caller. She claimed the website had revealed tweets characterized as anti-Semitic from one of HuffPost's junior staffers. But Daily Caller co-founder Neil Patel said it had followed basic journalist guidelines in its reporting.
The House Judiciary Committee will meet on Tuesday to hear testimony from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter on whether social media companies are filtering content for political reasons.
Conservative lawmakers have been critical of the social media companies. They claim some content is being removed as a result of politically motivated practices.
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