Social Media CEOs Get Subpoenas
Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is making good on his promise to look into Big Tech’s censorship practices, particularly regarding COVID. The committee has sent subpoenas to the CEOs of five social media mega-corporations “for documents and communications relating to the federal government’s reported collusion with Big Tech to suppress free speech,” they announced in a statement on Wednesday.
Subpoenas were served on:
- Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, parent company of Google
- Andy Jassy of Amazon
- Tim Cook of Apple
- Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (Facebook)
- Satya Nadella of Microsoft
These subpoenas really are a last resort, as the committee has been trying since December to engage with the five companies. Apparently, there was no cooperation from any of the CEOs. Would anyone have expected differently?
According to Debra Heine at AMERICAN GREATNESS, House Republicans are “looking into allegations that [the] Biden regime colluded with big technology and social-media companies to censor legitimate views on issues such as COVID-19 policy that countered the Biden White House’s propaganda.”
The purpose of this effort, Jordan said, is “protecting and advancing fundamental free speech principles” and “examining how private actors coordinate with the government to suppress First Amendment-protected speech.”
The WASHINGTON EXAMINER has more.
Jordan subpoenas Big Tech CEOs over content moderation
Did you notice that one Big Tech corporation’s CEO is NOT on the list? It’s Twitter, of course, because CEO Elon Musk has been doing plenty on his own to protect speech by exposing the collusion between government agencies such as the FBI and private companies to suppress it. The “Twitter Files” have told us far more about how content moderation works than we’ll probably ever hear from the other CEOs, who have until March 23 to comply.
We’re also learning a great deal about this from the court filings from a lawsuit brought against the Biden administration by the state attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri. In fact, there’s breaking news on that front. As the WASHINGTON EXAMINER reports, a request filed Wednesday in that case “revealed that officials at the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention regularly communicated with social media platforms about their content moderation decisions.”
Missouri AG Eric Schmitt said in a statement, “We have already received a number of documents that clearly prove that the federal government has an incestuous relationship with social media companies and clearly coordinate to censor freedom of speech, but we’re not done. The Department of Justice is cowering behind executive privilege and has refused to turn over communications between the highest-ranking Biden Administration officials and social media companies.”
The ‘Justice’ Department has identified at least 45 federal officials at various agencies who were “regularly communicating” with social media platforms about so-called “misinformation.” There are apparently others, officials at other agencies, whom they so far have “declined” to identify. More details here…
CDC and White House regularly discussed censorship with social media, emails show
When Mark Zuckerberg gets before the Judiciary Committee, he’ll likely be asked about some of the findings from this lawsuit. Example: We know at least 32 federal officials — including senior officials at the FDA, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (editorial aside: !!), and the White House (editorial aside: !!!) — have communicated with Meta about content moderation on its platforms. Let’s dig into those conversations.
Still, if these CEOs are called to testify, I wouldn’t expect to get a whole lot out of them. Recall that when former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was in the hot seat at a hearing with the House Energy and Commerce Committee in 2018, his answer to the question of whether his company “shadow-banned” was simply NO. Same for “censored.” Clearly they did, and he surely was aware of this, but the definitions of “shadow-ban” and even “censor” are apparently malleable enough for him to weasel out of a perjury charge, at least with THIS ‘Justice’ Department, which will offer him whatever escape hatch he needs.
Jack Dorsey told Congress under oath Twitter was not shadow-banning
The work of congressional committees is supposed to serve a legislative purpose, and this one’s certainly does. As the committee states in the subpoenas, “To develop effective legislation, such as the possible enactment of statutory limits on the Executive Branch’s ability to work with Big Tech to restrict the circulation of content and deplatform users, the Committee on the Judiciary must first understand how and to what extent the Executive Branch coerced and colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor speech.”
