CNN
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Republicans reside in a actuality distortion subject.
That’s the solely conclusion that may be drawn from Wednesday’s listening to on Capitol Hill the place GOP lawmakers continued to push a factually unsupported narrative in regards to the federal authorities secretly colluding with Twitter to censor the New York Put up’s Hunter Biden laptop computer story in 2020.
Regardless of no actual proof to help this weighty and consequential declare, Republicans have been unrelenting in peddling it to the American public. At Wednesday’s listening to they confirmed no regard for misinforming those that flip to them for correct info or the truth that they have been smearing a personal enterprise and its former executives within the course of.
Home Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, who appears to wish to be taken significantly by the Washington elite whereas tossing asinine pink meat to the Republican base, claimed Twitter fortunately adopted supposed FBI directions to censor the Hunter Biden story as a result of they have been “terrified of Joe Biden not winning the election.”
The unsupported declare is nothing new for him. Comer has long pushed the notion that Elon Musk’s launch of the so-called “Twitter Files” confirmed “evidence that the Biden campaign colluded with Big Tech to suppress a story that we now know is 100 percent true.” That, in fact, isn’t what the selectively launched firm paperwork present.
However Comer’s statements get to the center of the matter: By pushing the narrative that there was “collusion” between Massive Tech and the FBI to “censor” the Put up’s Hunter Biden story, Republicans are usually not so subtly feeding their election denying base motive to consider that the 2020 election was successfully rigged towards Donald Trump.
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Proper-wing media shops and personalities are completely happy to amplify these claims and unfold them to thousands and thousands of viewers who flip to them for his or her information. Fox Information, as an example, hyped the GOP claims from the listening to on Wednesday, portraying the nonsense popping out of the listening to as if it have been a critical affair uncovering appreciable wrongdoing.
The details — actuality — merely don’t matter. It didn’t transfer one Republican when the Twitter executives that they had subpoenaed earlier than the committee refuted their claims. And it didn’t matter a lot to the right-wing media equipment that blindly repeated them to their audiences.
“I am aware of no unlawful collusion with, or direction from, any government agency or political campaign on how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation,” James Baker, Twitter’s former deputy counsel, informed the committee whereas underneath oath.
And Matt Taibbi, one of many journalists Musk handpicked final 12 months to comb by Twitter’s inner messages for proof of free speech violations, said himself that “there is no evidence — that I’ve seen — of any government involvement in the laptop story.”
Such statements from Baker, former Belief and Security head Yoel Roth, and former normal counsel Vijaya Gadde saturated Wednesday’s listening to — however they fell on deaf ears. Republicans confirmed, as soon as once more, that they’re married to pushing claims that Silicon Valley is deliberately and unjustly censoring conservative views, even when the details don’t contort with their narrative.
Paradoxically, the listening to appeared to disclose that Twitter had acquiesced to Trump and altered its insurance policies after it concluded that he had violated its guidelines.
Anika Collier Navaroli, a former senior worker on Twitter’s content material moderation group, testified that the social media firm ended its ban on abusive language towards immigrants to “go back to where they came from” in order that Trump wouldn’t face repercussions for his racist 2019 assault on 4 minority Democratic congresswomen. “So much for bias against right-wing on Twitter,” Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez replied.
And the listening to hinted that the Trump White Home tried to censor the speech of at the very least one American: Chrissy Teigen. When Teigen referred to as Trump a sequence of expletives in 2019, Navaroli testified that she was informed the Trump White Home contacted Twitter and demanded that or not it’s eliminated.
Unusually sufficient, Republicans confirmed little interest in drilling down on this allegation of censorship. It’s no marvel why.
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