WASHINGTON — House Republicans summoned former Twitter executives Wednesday to respond to allegations that the social media platform has tried to silence right-wing voices, but the hour-long hearing yielded new revelations about how the company did not limit hate speech or material that could incite violence. , sometimes altering his own rules to avoid doing so.
The Oversight and Accountability Committee called the hearing to investigate a decision the company has admitted for years was a mistake: to block an unsubstantiated New York Post story about the activities of Hunter Biden, the son of President Biden, in Ukraine before the 2020 election, in which his father was running against President Donald J. Trump.
“Twitter aggressively cracked down on conservative elected officials, journalists and activists,” said Rep. James R. Comer, a Kentucky Republican and chairman of the oversight panel.
But the session also served as a forum for Democrats to air their concerns about the company’s behavior. They have accused Twitter of playing a pivotal role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, including by changing internal rules to allow Trump to keep posting until the riot.
“Twitter and other social media companies acted as the central organization and arena for the violent insurrection on January 6 against Congress and the Vice President,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the committee who also served on the committee. House selection. committee that investigated the January 6 attack.
Here are some points from the audience:
Trump tried to get model Chrissy Teigen censored for insulting him.
Anika Collier Navaroli, a former Twitter executive who came forward during the Jan. 6 investigation, recalled an incident in 2019 when a White House official tried to persuade the company to delete a tweet from model Chrissy Teigen. She had insulted Trump in vulgar terms after he referred to her as “dirty talk.”
Ms Teigen tweeted that Mr Trump was a “culona slut” who had avoided labeling her in his derogatory post. “An honor, Mr. President,” he added.
A divided congress
The 118th Congress is underway, with Republicans in control of the House and Democrats in the Senate.
Ms. Navaroli testified that the White House contacted Twitter to remove Ms. Teigen’s post.
“They wanted it down because it was a derogatory statement directed at the president,” he said.
Ms Navaroli added that Twitter often evaluated tweets to see if they contained more than three insults before judging that they had crossed the line of abuse. Twitter refused to remove Ms Teigen’s tweet.
Twitter changed internal rules to avoid limiting Trump’s tweets.
Ms. Navaroli also testified that Twitter changed its rules to avoid adding labels to some of Trump’s tweets that would have identified them as a violation of company rules. Among them were publications denigrating a group of liberal congressmen of color known as “the Squad.”
In 2019, when one of Trump’s tweets called on lawmakers to “go and help fix the totally destroyed and crime infested places they came from,” Navaroli’s team said it violated an internal Twitter rule that prohibited the demonization of immigrants. and the phrase “go back to where you came from.”
But when he pointed out the violation, Ms. Navaroli testified, a Twitter executive shot her down. Shortly thereafter, the company changed its policy to remove the phrase “go back to where you came from” from its internal rules on prohibited speech, she said.
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“So Twitter changed its own policy after the president violated it in order to accommodate his tweet?” asked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat and the highest-profile member of the team.
“Yes,” Ms. Navaroli replied.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez responded: “No more bias against the right on Twitter.”
Twitter could have done more to prevent the January 6 attack.
Ms Navaroli testified that she was “desperate” when Twitter executives refused to intervene as Trump’s rhetoric escalated ahead of January 6.
His team created a “Coded Incitement to Violence” policy to censor accounts, but Twitter executives refused to approve it, he said.
“On January 5, with the policy still unapproved, I led a meeting where one of my colleagues asked management if someone would have to be shot before we were allowed to remove the tweets,” he testified. “Another colleague searched for live tweets and read them to management to try to convince them of the seriousness of the problem. No action has been taken yet.”
After Jan. 6, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol and injured more than 150 police officers, Navaroli asked management “if they wanted more blood on their hands.”
Former Twitter executives denied that the FBI ordered them to block the New York Post article.
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has already admitted to Congress that the company was wrong to ban the Post article, and former executives who testified Wednesday again asserted that the company shouldn’t have done it.
But the former executives testified that while the decision was partly a reaction to FBI warnings about possible Russian disinformation, the government had not directly pressured the social media platform to block the article, a central charge brought by Republicans.
“I am not aware of any illegal collusion with any government agency or political campaign, or direction from any government agency or political campaign, about how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation,” James Baker, former general counsel, testified. Twitter attachment.
Rep. Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said he believed Twitter executives had been looking for a reason to censor the article before the election because they were biased. He cited a tweet by an executive comparing members of the Trump administration to “Nazis.”
“I think they played you guys,” Jordan said, adding: “I think they wanted to take him out. I think you guys were tricked by the FBI.”
A Twitter executive had to relocate due to threats.
Yoel Roth, former head of trust and security at Twitter, testified that he had to sell his home and move after becoming the target of online harassment.
Roth resigned from Twitter weeks after Elon Musk bought the company in October. After he wrote an op-ed for The New York Times criticizing Musk’s strategy, his internal emails became the focus of the so-called Twitter Files, a series of media reports based on Twitter documents. that Musk directed the company to provide. to various journalists.
The Twitter Files statements suggested that the platform followed the advice of the FBI and other government officials regarding content moderation issues and led to the online harassment of Mr. Roth.
Other former Twitter employees also shared their personal information online during the release of the Twitter files, Roth said, prompting further harassment.
“Those are the consequences of this type of harassment and speech,” he said.
Luke Broadwater reported from Washington, and kate conger from San Francisco.
