Former Twitter officials testified in front of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee on Wednesday discussing the platform’s alleged blocking of news surrounding Hunter Biden. The key testimony addressed a contentious discussion concerning the effect of social media on correctly presenting information to its consumers.
The committee’s chairman, James Comer, has sharply criticized Big Tech firms, charging them with violating the First Amendment and working with authorities to bury information that may be regarded as negative to Vice President Biden or his family.
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Comer said, “We owe it to the American people to provide answers about this collusion to censor information about Joe Biden’s involvement in his family’s business schemes.”
Prior to Twitter’s contentious censoring of New York Post stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop, Comer’s research revealed a troubling conspiracy between the government and Big Tech. These results imply a concerning attempt to limit free speech and weaken democracy.
Comer said, “In the months leading up to the laptop story, the FBI advised senior Twitter executives to question the validity of any Hunter Biden story. We also know that one of the witnesses before us today participated in an Aspen Institute exercise in September 2020 on a potential ‘hack and dump’ operation relating to Hunter Biden. Other Big Tech companies and reporters attended as well.”
He continued, “This exercise prepared them for their future collusion to suppress and delegitimize information contained in Hunter Biden’s laptop about the Biden family’s business schemes.”
Comer noted how the influence of Big Tech has brought about a new era in which it is now possible to accomplish degrees of political censorship that were previously unimaginable during an election. The prejudiced leadership of this sector is to blame for the decline of free expression.
People who actively oppose the fundamental rights of free speech and expression that are guaranteed by the US Constitution control several social media platforms. “We’ve witnessed Big Tech autocrats wield their unchecked power to suppress the speech of Americans to promote their preferred political opinions. Twitter was once one of these platforms — until Elon Musk purchased the company a few months ago …
Twitter ignored its own regulations and instead collaborated with the FBI for financial benefit by taking a reactive stance to censorship. Unfortunately, this permitted a violation of people’s right to free speech.
James Baker, a former deputy general counsel for Twitter, insisted that the firm was not acting as an agent of the government and was unaware of any illegal activities. He assertively and vehemently advocated their standpoint.
Baker said, “I think the best reading of the law is that as a private entity, the First Amendment protects Twitter and its content moderation decisions.” He continued, “Moreover, I’m aware of no unlawful collusion with or direction from any government agency or political campaign on how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation.”
During a congressional hearing, Rep. Jim Jordan posed an interesting question to Christopher Wray: had the FBI previously looked into Hunter Biden’s laptop? What more clarity may result from this line of inquiry in the coming days remains to be seen.
Baker responded, “I don’t recall speaking to the FBI at all about the Hunter Biden matter, laptop.”
Although it’s still not clear whether the Hunter Biden laptop story was among the requests for some information to be removed from Twitter, the company did reveal that requests had been made by government authorities. Vijaya Gadde, the former chief legal officer, did not provide any more information on the documents used in such investigations.
She said, “There was an ability of preventing something from appearing in one of the tabs of search results.”
Gadde provided insight on how visible filtering and labels like “do not amplify” are used by Twitter to select material for users during her time there. By doing this, they may maintain the relevance, interest, and appropriateness of their feed without sacrificing user experience or freedom of speech.
Comer raised the alarm that what seems to be government intervention on Twitter circumvents free speech safeguards guaranteed by the constitution, a worrying trend for our democracy.
Roth claimed, “Twitter made a mistake. “I’ll be the first to admit that we didn’t always get it right. Individual content moderation decisions will always be contentious, and reasonable minds can differ about whether a specific choice was right or wrong.”
I run into this with Quora and have been disciplined a couple times. I have no knowledge if it was only conservative comments restricted and have no knowledge if liberals have had such issues with Quora. I have heard, but not delved into this, but isn’t Quora owned by Google?
I would think credibility and the company’s financial interests better served by being neutral instead of trying to tell us what to think!