While Twitter quickly reversed the block on the Post article and rewrote its policies within days of the original decision, the company's botched handling of the episode has been the focus of debate and controversy for more than two years. Twitter declined to do so, but Democrats seized on her testimony to rebut Republicans' claims of political bias. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and other Democratic congresswomen.Ĭollier Navaroli also testified that the Trump White House had asked Twitter to remove a tweet by celebrity Chrissy Teigen insulting the president. While the Twitter Files disclosures highlighted requests from the Biden campaign for Twitter to review tweets that might violate its policies, the committee heard testimony that Republicans also sought to influence the platform - and that the company had even changed its policies to allow Trump to post content that broke its rules.Īnika Collier Navaroli, a former Twitter safety policy employee called as a witness by committee Democrats, told the panel that Twitter removed the phrase "go back to where you came from" from its policy barring abuse of immigrants after Trump expressed the sentiment in a 2019 tweet targeting Rep. They also showed the degree to which government officials, law enforcement and politicians regularly communicate with Twitter, along with other tech platforms, by flagging content that may violate the company's policies and sharing threat assessments. They revealed incomplete glimpses of how Twitter officials deliberated over high-profile decisions, including blocking the Post article and banning then-President Donald Trump after the Jan. The files consist of internal emails, Slack chats and other material pre-dating Musk's ownership. Republicans' allegations of collusion between Twitter, government officials and Democrats were given added fuel in recent months by new owner Elon Musk's release of internal Twitter documents, dubbed the "Twitter Files," to a hand-picked group of journalists. The White House slammed Wednesday's hearing as "a bizarre political stunt" and the latest effort by hardcore Republicans to "relitigate the outcome of the 2020 election." The hearing is among the first efforts by House Republicans to use their newly regained majority to launch a series of investigations into the Biden administration and what they describe as the "weaponization" of the federal government against conservatives. "I'm aware of no unlawful collusion with or direction from any government agency or political campaign on how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation," James Baker, who served as Twitter's deputy general counsel, told the committee. "I believe Twitter erred in this case because we wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2016," Yoel Roth, Twitter's former head of trust and safety, told the panel, alluding to Russia's hacking of Democratic National Committee emails that year that were selectively leaked to the public in the final months of the campaign.īut Roth and his fellow panelists denied that decision involved government agencies or Biden's campaign. Ultimately, they said, Twitter concluded it had made the wrong call by blocking it - something Twitter's CEO at the time, Jack Dorsey, said back in late 2020. The former Twitter officials acknowledged the Post story, based on material from Hunter Biden's laptop, was the subject of fraught debate and confusion inside the company. "Immediately following the story's publication, America witnessed a coordinated campaign by social media companies, mainstream news and the intelligence community to suppress and delegitimize the existence of Hunter Biden's laptop and its contents," he said. "Twitter, under the leadership of our witnesses today, was a private company the federal government used to accomplish what it constitutionally cannot: limit the free exercise of speech," committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., said in his opening remarks. government and Joe Biden's presidential campaign were involved in the social network's controversial, short-lived decision to block users from sharing a New York Post story about Biden's son Hunter just weeks before the 2020 election.Īt a contentious House Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday lasting more than six hours, Republicans accused the social media company of colluding with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Biden campaign to censor the Post story and aired long-held grievances over what they say is Silicon Valley's bias against conservatives. Former Twitter officials denied claims the U.S.
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