Live Updates: House hearing on Twitter’s Hunter Biden laptop “censorship”

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Tech newsletter reporter anchoring The Technology 202, focusing on politics and policy.

The lights have partially returned in the room, as power outages impacted a floor in the Rayburn House Office Building.

A committee aide told The Post that the power went down in a quadrant of the Rayburn House Office Building. Some of the computers and lights in the building went off, and the Wifi temporarily went down, the person said.

The Twitter hearing Wednesday revealed one eye-opening detail: former president Trump’s White House asked Twitter to remove a 2019 tweet from the model and internet personality Chrissy Teigen making fun of him.

In September 2019, Trump tweeted that Teigen was “filthy mouthed” and attacked Teigen’s husband, the musician John Legend, for not giving Trump more credit for signing a criminal justice reform bill into law. Teigen, who has 12 million followers, tweeted in response that Trump was a “p—y a– b—h.”

The hearing is temporarily in recess after the lights went out and WiFi stopped working, delaying a line of questioning about Twitter’s handling of content related to Iran.

“We’re wasting our time here bullying former Twitter employees,” Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), the first member of the Gen Z generation elected to Congress, said Wednesday’s hearing. “It’s calling the refs, so that way in the future when they want disinformation to be put on the internet, social media companies will be scared to call them out down the road.”

Despite repeated allegations from Republicans, the hearing has raised no evidence of collusion or pressure from the U.S. government. Frost said he hoped the committee would instead focus on alleged free speech abuses by Republican governors, including Fla. Gov. Ron DeSantis. He asserted DeSantis has been abusing his power over free speech in his efforts to revoke the liquor license of a drag bar and to shape school curriculum.

Democrats and Republicans agreed on little at Wednesday’s hearing save for one thing: the benefits of a massive poster board.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) presided over the entire session with a large poster of the controversial New York Post story about President Biden’s son perched just over his shoulder and in view of the television cameras.

Later, staffers for Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) rifled through giant images of leaked internal communications from the company detailing some of its deliberations, billed by owner Elon Musk as the “Twitter Files,” as he questioned the witnesses.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) interrupted an exchange between Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) and Yoel Roth, as the former Twitter executive explained why Greene’s personal account was suspended from the service after she repeatedly violated Twitter’s rules against covid misinformation, despite multiple written warnings.

“Who made you in charge of what’s true and what’s false?” she asked Roth. Her statement sparked a debate about committee rules between committee leaders, and Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) eventually stopped her and restarted the clock on Gomez’s line of questioning.

The First Amendment protects Americans from censorship by the government, not by private-sector companies, a key distinction in the debate over social media companies’ “censoring” online speech. Republicans’ justification for this hearing rests, in part, on the allegation that the government has at times pressured Twitter to suppress certain posts or accounts, which could raise some First Amendment questions. Even then, it’s not fully clear whether the First Amendment would apply.

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, pressed former Twitter trust and safety head Yoel Roth on that point today, asking whether he considers it a violation of the First Amendment when the government is “sending you an email saying, ‘We think these posts need to be taken down.’” Jordan was referring to screenshots shared as part of the ‘Twitter files’ showing communications in which the FBI and other federal agencies flagged posts and accounts for Twitter to review as possible violations of its rules.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) told former Twitter executives she was happy they lost their jobs, joining a cadre of Republicans seizing on the Twitter Files to advance allegations of censorship.

“Thank God Elon Musk bought Twitter,” she said.

Greene leveraged her moment in the spotlight to fuel a litany of baseless allegations of anti-conservative censorship under Twitter’s old leadership.

Rep. Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.) hammered Twitter on Wednesday for not permanently suspending the “Libs of TikTok” account for spreading false anti-LGBT claims that precipitated bomb threats against a children’s hospital.

The far-right account last year published a recording falsely suggesting that the Boston Children’s Hospital was performing hysterectomies on transgender children, after which the medical center was flooded with threatening emails and calls, including social media posts suggesting bombing the site, as The Washington Post reported.

Anika Collier Navaroli testified that Twitter changed its policies to accommodate former president Trump’s 2019 tweet about four liberal congresswomen, which said they should “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came.”

Collier Navaroli recommended that Twitter find Trump in violation of its policies, and apply a label to the tweet for the first time, in a response to a line of questioning from one of the targeted congresswomen, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

At the time, Twitter had a policy on abuse against immigrants, which included an example of banning the phrase “go back to your country” or “go back to where you came from,” Collier Navaroli testified. She said then Twitter executive Del Harvey overrode her recommendation and that example was removed from the guidance.

Baker and Roth denied that the FBI encouraged Twitter to block the spread of the New York Post article, contrary to Republicans accusations of collusion between FBI and social media companies.

Roth told the committee that the FBI did not tell Twitter that the laptop was fake or hacked, and Baker said he was not in communication with the FBI about the company’s decision to limit the article’s spread.

Despite the executives’ denials, Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, continued to assert without evidence that the FBI was behind the decision.

Twitter’s former safety chief Yoel Roth testified Wednesday that social media platforms remain inundated with Russian disinformation networks seeking to stoke divisions overseas.

Roth said his team in 2017 uncovered “significant interference in an American election by agents of the Russian government,” including “hundreds of thousands of accounts” from Russia and other countries, including Iran and China.

When Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) questioned Roth about the remark, Roth added, “That’s not just past tense. Those accounts are active on social media today. This is an ongoing campaign.”

Twitter’s former safety chief Yoel Roth testified that he had to leave his home and sell it, after the release of the Twitter Files and Twitter owner Elon Musk amplified “defamatory” claims that he condones pedophilia.

“This lie led directly to a wave of homophobic and antisemitic attacks against me… of which Twitter has removed vanishingly little,” he testified.

Roth said Twitter employees around the world, including in the Philippines, were also doxed.

Read more about the acceleration of attacks on Twitter under Musk’s leadership here.