Elon Musk’s release of information detailing how Twitter suppressed speech during the 2020 presidential election is only the beginning of the story, according to one Texas congressman.
“Investigations are coming,” Republican Rep. Troy Nehls of Texas tweeted Friday.
Twitter acting by itself to suppress free speech is not a 1st amendment violation, but acting under orders from the government to suppress free speech, with no judicial review, is
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 3, 2022
Earlier Friday, journalist Matt Taibbi released internal Twitter communications that showed Twitter employees took down tweets at the behest of the Biden campaign and the Trump White House. Taibbi noted that because the Twitter staff was overwhelmingly liberal, there were “more channels” to censor speech available to the left.
9. Celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party: pic.twitter.com/4uzkHnQ65E
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 2, 2022
As Nehls promised an investigation, others noted that the liberal media was ignoring the release of the “Twitter Files.”
Yep, I checked. As of 9:45am this morning, not a single mention of the Twitter revelations on the main pages of @nytimes or @washingtonpost. pic.twitter.com/SNb5F2hd5U
— Athan Koutsiouroumbas (@Athan_K) December 3, 2022
Whatever your politics are, if you’re in media and you don’t think new revelations about the most severe censorship of a newspaper’s story in big tech history isn’t a story worthy of covering you aren’t a journalist you’re a propagandist.
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) December 3, 2022
Fox News host Dan Bongino said the censorship revealed by the Twitter Files is troubling.
“The government cannot deputize private actors to do what the government is forbidden from doing constitutionally,” Bongino said Saturday.
“On free speech, this most sacred of rights, you can’t say to Twitter, ‘Listen, you need to do this on our behalf and communicate with government officials because we can’t do it ourselves,’ and do kind of an end-around,” he said.
Bongino said the truly scary issue is that this was only one instance of Big Tech muzzling speech.
“If they don’t like an opinion, they’ll call something ‘missing context’ or whatever,” Bongino said of Facebook fact-checkers.
“It then reduces the reach of your page and shuts you down. And if you get a strike you can be entirely demonetized and kicked off the platform. They never do that to liberals. This war on free speech is real.”
Bongino said free speech should be a unifying issue, citing Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California, who the Twitter Files revealed raised concerns with a Twitter executive over the censorship of stories on Hunter Biden’s laptop scandal.
“I’ll go to war with anyone — with the ACLU, Ro Khanna, Bernie Sanders,” Bongino said. “The best counter to free speech you don’t like is other free speech. I mean, didn’t we used to all agree on this? What’s happened?”