US Republican leader calls for Big Tech investigation
The Republican Party must be ready to investigate some of the US’ largest tech firms, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has said, in response to recently released documents showing that Twitter suppressed information damaging to Joe Biden in 2020.
McCarthy said on Saturday that the incoming Republican majority “will get answers for the American people” about Twitter’s efforts to “silence the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop just days before the 2020 presidential election.” This will happen when the GOP takes back control of the House of Representatives in January, McCarthy stressed.
Documents released by new Twitter CEO Elon Musk on Friday show a top-down effort by the platform’s most senior staff to suppress the spread of a New York Post article alleging that Joe Biden took part in numerous pay-to-play schemes with his son’s foreign business contacts whilst he was vice president of the US. Twitter banned the sharing of links to the story, even in private messages.
Facebook also took action to censor the Hunter Biden story, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg later saying he was instructed to by the FBI.
Appearing on Fox News on Sunday, McCarthy called on the GOP to look beyond just Twitter.
“Now we need to start looking at Facebook, at Google. These now have become arms of the Democratic Party, arms of the Biden administration,” he said. The prospective speaker of the House also called for the investigation of dozens of former intelligence officials who falsely claimed that the Hunter Biden story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
“[The Democrats] also used the intel community as well to lie to the American public. Should those people keep their clearances? Should those people still be allowed to have information?” he asked.
“They used every arm not only of the government, but they had taken over businesses to lie to the American public,” McCarthy continued. “This is just the beginning. All this will be held up.”
The CEOs of Facebook, Twitter, and Google have all been summoned to Capitol Hill for hearings before, with Democrats grilling the tech bosses on their efforts to stamp out so-called “disinformation,” Republicans accusing them of unfairly censoring conservative content, and members of both parties denouncing these firms for allegedly breaching antitrust laws.
