Newly empowered Republicans are coming for Big Tech, alleging collusion

[cigaretteman]

Soon after Elon Musk took over Twitter, he began promoting screenshots of internal company documents that he said exposed “free speech suppression” on the social media platform during the 2020 election.
Republicans were thrilled, write The Post’s Cat Zakrzewski and Cristiano Lima. Per our colleagues:

“We knew Big Tech was censoring conservatives, but the #TwitterFiles keep showing us it was worse than we thought,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) tweeted recently.
On Wednesday, Musk’s “Twitter Files” will take center stage in a Capitol Hill hearing where GOP leaders will try to advance their campaign to turn Twitter’s decision to briefly block sharing a story about the president’s son into evidence of a broad conspiracy. Conservatives have long argued that Silicon Valley favors Democrats by systematically suppressing right-wing viewpoints on social media. These allegations have evolved in nearly a half-decade of warnings, as politicians in Washington and beyond fixate on the industry’s communications with Democratic leaders, seeking to cast the opposing party as against free speech.
The Twitter Files show no evidence of such a plot. Conservative influencers and stories from conservative platforms regularly draw a massive audience on social media. But Wednesday’s hearing, which will feature former Twitter executives as witnesses, is the latest effort to advance an increasingly popular Republican argument.

You can read the full story here.

 

[cigaretteman]

Soon after Elon Musk took over Twitter, he began promoting screenshots of internal company documents that he said exposed “free speech suppression” on the social media platform during the 2020 election.
Republicans were thrilled, write The Post’s Cat Zakrzewski and Cristiano Lima. Per our colleagues:

You can read the full story here.

Less than an hour before its scheduled start, a White House spokesman on Wednesday called a Republican-led House Oversight Committee hearing “a bizarre political stunt.”
The hearing is focused on Twitter’s decision more than two years ago to block access to a New York Post story that was based on emails gleaned from a laptop once owned by President Biden’s son Hunter Biden.
“The morning after President Biden delivered a State of the Union Address emphasizing the significant progress we’ve made as a nation to generate historic job and economic growth and the work still to be done to address Americans’ top priorities like tackling inflation, raising wages, and investing in manufacturing and infrastructure jobs, House Republicans are making it their top priority to stage a bizarre political stunt,” White House spokesman Ian Sams said in a statement.
Sams said the hearing appears to be another attempt by “extreme” Republicans to “relitigate the outcome of the 2020 election.”
“This is not what the American people want their leaders to work on,” Sams said. “As the President has said and made his focus, the American people expect their leaders to work together in a bipartisan way on the issues that most impact their lives and their families, not attack his family with long-debunked conspiracy theories.”
The Post is providing live updates on the hearing. You can read coverage here.