Republican Rep. Nancy Mace blasted a former Twitter executive as part of a House Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday, investigating censorship on the social media platform.
Multiple Republicans cited the Twitter Files reports when grilling the Twitter executives about this censorship. One of those republicans included Mace, whose line of questioning focused mainly on Twitter’s censorship during the COVID-19 pandemic. He argued that the executives were not qualified to censor those they censored.
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Mace asked Vijaya Gadde, the former general counsel and head of legal, policy, and trust at Twitter, about her medical qualifications. “Where did you go to medical school?” she asked.
“I did not go to medical school,” Gadde said.
“That’s what I thought,” Mace replied.
After re-affirming that Gadde is not a doctor. Mace asked why Twitter executives thought they had the “medical expertise” to censor doctors who were critical of COVID-19 policies. Gadde started to defend herself by claiming Twitter was trying to “protect individuals,” again presuming that they were qualified to do such a thing, but Mace quickly cut her off.
“You guys censored Harvard-educated doctors, Stanford-educated doctors, doctors that are educated in the best places in the world, and you silenced those voices”
One example of a censored doctor Mace pointed to was Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford medical doctor who was heavily critical of Covid lockdowns. According to one of journalist Bari Weiss’ segments of the Twitter files, the doctor was put on a trends blacklist, which prevented him or his tweets from gaining broader attention on the app.
3. Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending. pic.twitter.com/qTW22Zh691
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
Congresswoman Nancy Mace Hammers former Twitter Goons about censoring doctors differing opinions on Covid and CDC.. mentions that she regrets the vaccine, has developed Asthma and heart pains that she doesn’t think will ever go away. pic.twitter.com/UQMX3IPcK4
— Matt Couch (@RealMattCouch) February 8, 2023
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Bhattacharya was not alone, either. Many medical professionals joined together on the Great Barrington Declaration to question the COVID-19 policies but never gained traction.
However, despite this being Mace’s main focus, the heart of the hearing centered on the censorship of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden Laptop story. The story came in the run-up to the 2020 election and contained embarrassing content regarding Hunter Biden and potentially the whole Biden family. Twitter temporarily suspended the story, preventing it from being shared on the app and even banning some accounts that attempted to retweet it.
Democrats, however, were eager to stop talking about it. Florida freshman congressman Maxwell Frost called the entire hearing a “waste of time.” Alexandria Occasio Cortez, the democratic house representative of New York, called the hearing a “Waste of public resources” and the laptop story “half fake.”
The real kicker is that Twitter may not have been acting entirely autonomously. One segment of the Twitter Files released by Matt Taibi indicated that Twitter was working in response to the FBI and Biden himself.
“By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: ‘More to review from the Biden team.’ The reply would come back: ‘Handled.'”
According to the Twitter files, the FBI hinted to Twitter that disinformation regarding a laptop would likely be coming their way before the story broke but never explicitly ordered it to be suppressed. Whether or not that involvement rises to a first amendment violation is unclear, but those conducting the hearing are intent on finding out.
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