There was no shortage of fireworks during Thursday’s House Oversight Committee hearing which focused on the “Twitter Files” and allegations of government censorship of lawful speech.
The bipolar contentious hearing featured Matt Taibi and Michael Shellenberger getting feted by Republican lawmakers and absolutely grilled by their Democratic colleagues in an exercise that seemed not to uncover any deeper truths but just further divided the nation — which may have been the point all along.
One moment that stood out was a back-and-forth between Rep. Dan Goldman, who insisted, “You cannot find actual evidence of any direct government censorship of any lawful speech.”
Rep. Jim Jordan replied by citing an email from Clarke Humphrey, Executive Office of the Presidency White House Office, that read, “Hey, folks wanted to flag the below tweet and then wondering if we can get moving on the process for having it removed ASAP.” You can watch this moment below:
Goldman exposes Jordan for presenting incomplete information during the hearing to create a narrative of Biden administration censorship pic.twitter.com/eBAFl3zPmJ
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 9, 2023
The offending tweet was from anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert Kennedy, Jr., who suggested that baseball legend Hank Aaron died due to the Covid vaccine, which has been widely reported as false:
Multiple outlets fact-checked the claim about Aaron’s death as not true.
The Trump administration ALSO asked Twitter to remove a Tweet, but it was a different sort altogether. It was model Chrissy Teigen’s mean Tweet which called Trump a “Pussy ass bitch” which was read into Congressional record during a February 8th hearing also focused on Twitter.
So there you have it. Both administrations appeared to have asked Twitter to remove at least ONE Tweet.
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