Former Twitter officials have been asked to appear before the House Oversight Committee at a hearing in early February to discuss the company’s choice to suppress the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” tale on its site.
Before the 2020 presidential election, Twitter stopped distributing the New York Post articles that connected President Biden to his son’s international business connections, citing a “hacked materials” policy without any supporting data.
The hearing will explore the choice made by former Twitter employees Vijaya Gadde, Yoel Roth, and James Baker to suppress the narrative, wrote the committee’s new chairman, James Comer (R-KY), who also invited the three to appear before the committee.
The three former CEOs have until January 18 to react, according to Comer.
Gadde, the previous head of policy, was let go by Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, in October. Former Trust and Safety Director Roth submitted his resignation in November.
The “Twitter Files” are internal documents and emails that illustrate the inner workings of the platform’s censoring choices. Baker, a veteran attorney and general counsel for the FBI, was dismissed by Musk in Dec. for allegedly impeding his efforts to publicize them.
According to the Twitter Files, Twitter and the FBI worked closely together as well as other components of the American security apparatus. The documents showed that Yoel Roth was meeting with the FBI and other U.S. security organizations at the time the Hunter Biden story was being suppressed.
The documents also showed that most Democrats, with the exception of Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), thought the platform’s censorship went too far.
One of the top tech industry lobbyists in Washington, D.C., Carl Szabo, wrote in an email to Twitter that Democratic lawmakers he spoke with after the Hunter Biden story suppression expressed their opinion that “social media needs to moderate more” and expressed displeasure that the story had been permitted to spread as far as it did.