Former Twitter senior staff testimonial started Wednesday before the House oversight committee on the social media platform’s handling of reports on Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.
The hearing set the stage for the agenda of a newly Republican-controlled House, underscoring its intent to target long-standing and unsubstantiated allegations that big tech platforms have an anti-conservative bias.
Recently deceased Twitter employees who spoke include Vijaya Gadde, the social network’s former chief legal officer, former deputy general counsel James Baker, former head of security and integrity Yoel Roth and former security leader Anika Collier Navaroli.
The hearing focuses on a question that has long dogged Republicans: why Twitter decided to temporarily restrict sharing of a story about Hunter Biden in the New York Post, published in October 2020.
The Post said it received a copy of a laptop hard drive from then-Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani that Hunter Biden had left 18 months earlier at a Delaware computer repair shop and never recovered. Twitter initially blocked people from sharing links to the article for several days, citing concerns about misinformation and spreading a report based on potentially hacked materials.
“Americans deserve answers about this attack on the first amendment and why big tech and swamp colluded to censor this information about the Biden family selling access for profit.” saying Republican committee chairman James Comer before the hearing, referring to Trump’s characterization of the Democratic political establishment as a swamp. “Accountability is coming,” he added.
In opening statements on Wednesday, former Twitter employees described the process by which the story was blocked, saying it triggered Twitter’s rules against sharing hacked materials. The item had met with skepticism due to questions about the origins of the laptop and Twitter politics restricted the sharing of materials that were accessed illegally. While the company explicitly allowed “reporting a hack or sharing press coverage about the hack,” it blocked stories that shared “private personal information, such as email addresses and phone numbers,” which the Post story appeared to include. . The platform modified these rules after the Biden controversy.
Roth, the former head of security and integrity, said Twitter acknowledged that censoring the story was a mistake.
“Defending free speech and maintaining the health of the platform required tough trials,” he said. “There is no easy way to run a global communications platform that meets business and revenue goals, individual customer expectations, local laws and cultural norms and get it right every time.”
Months later, Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey called the company’s communications surrounding the Post article “not very good.” He added that blocking the article’s URL with “zero context” about why it was blocked was “unacceptable.”
Elon Musk, who bought the company last year, has since shared a series of internal records showing how the company initially stopped the story from being shared, citing pressure from the Biden administration, among other factors.
Republican theories that Democrats are colluding with Big Tech to stifle conservative speech have become a hot topic in Washington, with members of Congress using various tech hearings to question executives. But experts say independent researchers have refuted the claims of anti-conservative bias.
“What we have seen time and time again is that companies are taking down people who spread racism and conspiracy theories in violation of company rules,” said Jessica J González, co-executive director of the civil rights group Free Press.
“The fact that those people are disproportionately Republican has nothing to do with it,” he added. “It’s about right or wrong, not left or right.”
Musk’s decision to release information about the laptop’s history comes after he allowed the return of high-profile figures banned for spreading misinformation and engaging in hate speech, including the former president. The executive has shared and engaged with conspiracy theories on his personal account.
The White House has sought to discredit the Republican investigation into Hunter Biden, calling it “political stunts divorced from reality.” Nonetheless, Republicans now have subpoena power in the House, giving them the authority to demand testimony and conduct an aggressive investigation.
In opening remarks at Wednesday’s hearing, Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland expressed frustration that the first technology-focused panel of the session focused on the Hunter Biden story, which he called a “fake scandal.” He said that private companies under the first amendment are free to decide what is allowed on their platforms.
“Silly doesn’t even begin to grasp this obsession,” he said of the laptop story. “Furthermore, Twitter’s editorial decision has been scrutinized and debated over and over again. Some people think it was the right decision. Some people think that it was a wrong decision. But the key point here is that it was a Twitter decision.”
Online advocacy groups and big tech watchdogs have He said the focus on the alleged anti-conservative bias of social media companies has served as a distraction from legitimate concerns, holding back the possibility of useful legislation to address issues such as misinformation, antitrust concerns and online hate speech.
“The fact that this is the first technical hearing of this Congress says something,” González said. “There are real problems facing people across the political spectrum due to big technology and lack of regulation. But instead we’re getting a huge waste of time and a political stunt. The focus of Congress should be to serve the people who elected them to office.”
Associated Press contributed reporting
