Former Twitter employees Wednesday told the US House Oversight Committee that no government officials were involved in the 2020 decision to suppress a news story about Hunter Biden’s–son of President Joe Biden–laptop. The decision at issue occurred in October 2020, just a month before the 2020 US presidential election.
On October 14, 2020, the New York Post shared a story on Twitter about contents allegedly contained on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Twitter flagged the tweets and froze the New York Post’s access, as the tweets seemed to contain images obtained via hacking in violation of a 2018 Twitter policy. Upon public outcry, however, Twitter revised the 2018 policy and informed the New York Post that it could continue posting once it deleted the flagged tweets. Because the 2018 policy had been revised, the New York Post could have chosen to repost the materials but did not. After two weeks, Twitter made an exception and lifted the freeze on the New York Post’s account.
During the hearing, former Twitter chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde, former Twitter deputy general counsel James Baker, Twitter former global head of trust and safety Yoel Roth and former Twitter safety policy team member Anika Collier Navaroli presented testimony. All four former employees emphasized that the Twitter’s 2020 decisions surrounding the New York Post’s account were made entirely independent of any government influence. However, in their view, the decision was a “mistake.”
The accusations of government involvement in the 2020 decision stem from a series of internal documents known as the “Twitter Files,” which Twitter CEO Elon Musk began releasing to individual journalists in mid-December 2022. Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) argued that the Twitter Files demonstrated “a coordinated campaign by social media companies, mainstream news and the intelligence communities to suppress and de-legitimized the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop and its contents.” However, ranking member of the committee Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) condemned Thursday’s hearing a “faux scandal.”
Baker stated that he was unaware of any sort of coordination between government and Twitter officials surrounding the 2020 decision. Roth also stressed:
We were careful to keep the teams involved in those interactions cordoned off from the implementation of our rules. Twitter’s government relations staff — the people you see in the Twitter Files answering emails from campaign staff and members of Congress — did not have any kind of decision-making authority over policy enforcement.
This is not the first time Congress has called on Twitter employees to explain content moderation choices. In November 2020, the US Senate Judiciary Committee called on Twitter’s former chief executive Jack Dorsey to testify on the very issue discussed during Thursday’s hearing. At the time, Dorsey defended Twitter’s decision. As Dorsey highlighted, and the Twitter employees emphasized on Thursday, Twitter tightened its content moderation practices following Russian misinformation campaigns around the 2016 presidential election.
