The Republican National Committee also is worried that Facebook could use the immense amount of control it has over what people see online to sway voters.

"With 167 million US Facebook users reading stories highlighted in the trending section, Facebook has the power to greatly influence the presidential election," the RNC said in a blog post. "It is beyond disturbing to learn that this power is being used to silence view points and stories that don't fit someone else's agenda."

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Facebook has strenuously denied the allegations, which were published Monday by tech site Gizmodo. The report cited an anonymous former Facebook contractor who said news curators at the social network "routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers" from the module that highlights current events.

Tom Stocky, a Facebook executive who leads the team behind Trending Topics, said in a Facebook post published Tuesday that the company has found "no evidence" that the allegations are true.

The news that shows up in the section is first surfaced via an algorithm that detects popular topics and then audited by a review team, Stocky said.

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"Facebook does not allow or advise our reviewers to systematically discriminate against sources of any ideological origin," Stocky wrote, "and we've designed our tools to make that technically not feasible."

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The Gizmodo report said stories covered by conservative outlets that attracted enough attention by Facebook's news algorithm were excluded unless they were also covered by more mainstream news sites.

Those decisions appeared to be made by individual workers, rather than as part of a larger policy. "[T]here is no evidence that Facebook management mandated or was even aware of any political bias at work," according to Gizmodo.

However, in other cases, managers instructed reviewers to insert news stories that management considered important but that hadn't gained enough traffic for Facebook's algorithms to put them within the Trending Topics feed, the Gizmodo article said. One of the anonymous former curators told the tech site that the Black Lives Matter movement was given preference in this way.