Republican lawmakers are demanding hearings and criminal investigations in the wake of the steady release of government emails and internal Twitter communications indicating a coordinated effort to squelch disfavored narratives on COVID-19 and elections, as well as mislead Congress about the nature and scope of Twitter’s content moderation decisions.
In light of the “Twitter Files” that new owner Elon Musk is releasing with independent bloggers Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss (bloggers are more valuable than journalists because unlike journalists, they tell the truth), Senate Commerce Committee ranking member Senator Roger Wicker (R-MI) has asked Chair Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) to schedule a hearing on Big Tech censorship.
By the way, both Taibbi and Weiss are liberal reporters who I highly admire, not just because they are involved in the dissemination of the Twitter Files, but because they are honest liberals. There are still a few of them around.
Wicker told Cantwell on Thursday that the first batch showed Twitter’s method for suppressing the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop dump was “haphazard at best,” with many staffers doubting the “hacked materials” policy justification. “Twitter coordinated with a presidential campaign and [the Democratic National Committee] to suppress speech.” That is now evident and cannot be explained away.
Even with the stunning defection of Senator Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) on Friday, who declared she will not caucus with Republicans, Senate Democrats can continue to block hearings. Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock’s reelection “victory” in the runoff election guarantees Democrats 50 seats, even if Sinema does not caucus with them.
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) charged that former Twitter Trust and Safety Head Yoel Roth “flat-out lied” in his affidavit to the Federal Election Commission over not interacting with Democrats or the Biden campaign to restrict reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Roth quit Twitter two weeks after Musk purchased the company, probably trying to avoid being publicly fired. If that’s why, it’s an indication Roth knew what they were doing at Twitter was wrong.
VISIT OUR YOUTUBE CHANNELTwitter’s argument that it blocked “potentially hacked content” from the laptop “for bona fide commercial reasons” and to enforce its regulations was accepted by the FEC. Of course it was. According to the Twitter Files, though, the corporation had no clear reason to assume the materials were hacked.
In the face of “and everyone who lied under oath, they better be retaining lawyers” because they will be facing “real civil and criminal jeopardy,” Cruz warned Fox News. When the GOP takes office next year, he plans to “haul these people before Congress to testify under oath” about their earlier assertions. That’s what Democrats usually do. They make the process the punishment. They always make conservatives go through investigations so that they have to spend millions of dollars on legal fees. So it’s going to be cleansing to see leftist sensors go through the same. I normally don’t wish that kind of ill will on anyone, but these people are just despicable.
Everyone at Twitter who lied to the Federal Election Commission needs to retain lawyers.
Those folks are in real civil and real criminal jeopardy right now. #TwitterFiles pic.twitter.com/jKCoirhSAy
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) December 6, 2022
Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) told Cowboy State Daily that she believes the Twitter Files demonstrate “government wrongdoing.” That’s pretty obvious, but Republicans have to actually say these things out loud because the misinformation fake news media are doing their level best to cover for the censors on twitter.
Lummis said the House Oversight Committee should “investigate why the Hunter Biden laptop was alleged to have been a Russian-generated falsehood,”
The “accumulation of accusations pointed at the FBI’s Washington, DC, bureau” is also worthy of “serious investigation by Congress,” Lummis said, presumably referring to the recent deposition of FBI agent Elvis Chan in Missouri and Louisiana’s federal-Big Tech lawsuit.
On Friday, Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), who will take over as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee in January, told Fox News that the Twitter Files may not be complete because “the guy vetting the release of this information is the same guy” who was a key player in the FBI’s now-discredited Trump-Russia investigation.
Musk fired Deputy General Counsel James Baker, a former FBI general counsel, on Tuesday for secretly reading the first batch of Twitter Files before they were released to Taibbi, according to the blogger. Musk called Baker’s rationale for doing so “unconvincing,”
When Twitter hired Baker back in 2020, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, another honest liberal, labeled him “the Kevin Bacon of the Russian collusion scandals,” bringing “the same signature bias that characterized the Russian investigations”
Jordan told Fox News, “I really want to talk to” Chan, the recently deposed FBI agent, about those weekly briefings he organized with social media giants ahead of the 2020 election. “Was Jim Baker the guy he was briefing? … I want to know how cozy that was.”
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) December 9, 2022
Jordan stated that if Republicans win the majority next year, they will strive to “fully expose everything.” He’s curious if any of the 51 former intelligence officers who branded the laptop as Russian disinformation on the night of the 2020 election were communicating with Baker on Twitter.
According to the latest batch of Twitter Files, published Thursday night by Weiss, then-CEO Jack Dorsey resorted to semantic hairsplitting when he told Congress in a 2018 hearing that Twitter did not secretly limit the reach of right-of-center politicians and influencers, a practice known colloquially as “shadowbanning.”
In a 2018 blog post, legal policy leader and all-around censoring scumbag Vijaya Gadde also stated that Twitter did not shadowban and “certainly” not on the basis of “political viewpoints or ideology,” but classified the technique as hiding rather than limiting the reach of tweets. Dorsey later backed up his claim.
According to Weiss’ materials, Stanford medical professor Jay Bhattacharya, a coauthor of the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration, and Chaya Raichik, who runs the conservative Libs of Tik Tok account, were on a “trends blacklist” that limited the reach of their tweets via “visibility filtering.”
3. Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending. pic.twitter.com/qTW22Zh691
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
I believe at first the despicable things that the Twitter people did was to get rid of Donald Trump. The Twitter leftists were always wont to censor conservative speech on the platform, but they went into full-blown Marxist mode once they decided that Trump could not be reelected. And I believe, and I hope, that they will pay a dear price for this. When you think about it, you have to wonder how many people died because these people censored important medical information from the town square. And you have to wonder what our lives would be like today had Twitter and other tech tyrants not interfered in the 2020 election. Americans have gotten used to no one being held accountable for attacks on them by leftists and Democrats, but this needs to be different. People involved in all of this need to be held accountable. Conservatives were told that they were conspiracy nuts when they talked about this stuff. Remember how crazy it was to hear real doctors telling you information about their protocols and patients who they treated with certain therapeutic drugs during the COVID pandemic only to find them censored off of social media and the leftist brute squad came out and attacked them and their character.
Your point of view caught my eye and was very interesting. Thanks. I have a question for you.