Months after subpoenaing Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as part of a censorship investigation, a House panel is moving ahead with plans to charge him with Contempt of Congress. It would be a means of punishing him for refusing to honor their subpoenas. The Judiciary Committee, led by Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), said a markup session is scheduled for Thursday afternoon the committee will vote on passing the resolution onto the floor for a full vote on the contempt charges.
The panel’s report said:
“The Committee’s subpoena to Meta, issued on February 15, 2023, requires, among other things, that Meta produce material concerning its engagement with the Executive Branch and Meta’s decisions and policies regarding content moderation. Although directly responsive to the Committee’s subpoena, Meta has failed to produce nearly all of the relevant documents internal to the company.”
META replied:
“To date we have delivered over 53,000 pages of documents — both internal and external — and have made nearly a dozen current and former employees available to discuss external and internal matters, including some scheduled this very week. Meta will continue to comply, as we have thus far, with good faith requests from the committee.”
Are they telling the truth? Probably, but it takes a page out of the obstruction handbook. This farce is where they gather together all of the worthless information and pass it on, withholding the juicy bits and saving them for the very last. In addition to Zuckerberg, top executives from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple were also subpoenaed with a deadline towards the end of March.
VISIT OUR YOUTUBE CHANNELElon Musk’s Twitter did not appear on the subpoena list because Jordan says they are now the very essence of transparency.
Twitter, which this week owner Elon Musk rebranded to X, did not appear on the subpoena list. At the time, Jordan touted how Twitter “set a benchmark for how transparent Big Tech companies can be about interactions with government over censorship” following the release of The Twitter Files.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook that recently introduced its Twitter-competitor app called Threads, had as of Tuesday “produced only documents between Meta and external entities and a small subset of relevant internal documents” to the House Judiciary Committee, the panel’s report said.
The committee “has a particular need for Meta’s internal documents, which would shed light on how Meta understood, evaluated, and responded to the Executive Branch’s requests or directives to censor content, as well as Meta’s decision-making process to censor viewpoints in the modern town square,” the panel added.
While alluding to an ongoing lawsuit over alleged collusion between the federal government and social media companies to censor speech in violation of the First Amendment, the panel’s report indicated Congress may develop legislation to enact “new statutory limits on the Executive Branch’s ability to work with technology companies to restrict the circulation of content and deplatform users.”
Among the recommendations made in the report, beyond holding Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress, is to have the House speaker refer the matter to the U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., and “otherwise take all appropriate action to enforce the subpoena.”
k Zuckerbergmpt of Congress.
