WASHINGTON — House Republicans on Wednesday called on former Twitter executives to respond to allegations that the social media platform tried to silence voices on the right, but the hour-long hearing yielded new revelations about how that was done Company has failed to restrict hate speech or material that might incite violence sometimes changes its own rules to avoid doing so.
The Oversight and Accountability Committee convened the hearing to examine a decision the company has acknowledged for years as a mistake: a groundless suspension New York Post Article on the activities of Hunter Biden, son of President Biden, in Ukraine ahead of the 2020 election in which his father was running against President Donald J. Trump.
“Twitter has aggressively repressed conservative elected officials, journalists and activists,” said Rep. James R. Comer, Kentucky Republican and chairman of the oversight panel.
But the session also served as a forum for Democrats to voice their concerns about the company’s behavior. They have accused Twitter of playing a crucial role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, including by changing internal rules that allow Mr Trump to continue posting until the riot.
“Twitter and other social media companies acted as the central organizing and arenas for the January 6 violent uprising against Congress and the Vice President,” said Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the committee, who is also a member of the House of Representatives was committee investigating the January 6 attack.
Here are some insights from the hearing:
Mr Trump tried to have model Chrissy Teigen censored for insulting him.
Anika Collier Navaroli, a former Twitter executive who whistleblowed during the Jan. 6 investigation, recalled an incident in 2019 when a White House official tried to persuade the company to block a tweet from model Chrissy to delete dough. She had vulgarly insulted Mr Trump after he called her “dirty”.
Ms. Teigen tweeted that Mr. Trump a “Pussy Ass Bitch” who avoided tagging her in his derogatory post. “An honor, Mr. President,” she added.
A divided congress
The 118th Congress is underway, with Republicans controlling the House of Representatives and Democrats controlling the Senate.
Ms. Navaroli testified that the White House reached out to Twitter to delete Ms. Teigen’s post.
“They wanted it to come down because it was a derogatory statement to the president,” she said.
Ms Navaroli added that Twitter often evaluated tweets to see if they contained more than three insults before deciding they had crossed the abuse line. Twitter declined to delete Ms. Teigen’s tweet.
Twitter has changed internal rules not to restrict Mr Trump’s tweets.
Ms. Navaroli also testified that Twitter changed its rules to avoid adding labels to some of Mr. Trump’s tweets, which she identified as violating company rules. Among them were posts that vilified a group of liberal colored congressmen known as “the squad”.
When one of Mr. Trump’s tweets in 2019 called for lawmakers to “go and help fix the totally broken and crime-ridden places they came from,” Ms. Navaroli’s team said it was against a broke internal Twitter rule prohibiting demonization of immigrants and the phrase “go back where you came from”.
But when she reported the violation, Ms Navaroli testified, she was rebuffed by a Twitter executive. Shortly after, the company changed its policy to remove the phrase “go back to where you came from” from its internal rules on prohibited speech, she said.
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“So Twitter changed its own policy after the president violated it to possibly accommodate his tweet?” asked Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat and the high-profile member of the roster.
“Yes,” replied Ms. Navaroli.
Ms Ocasio-Cortez replied, “So much for the anti-right wing bias on Twitter.”
Twitter could have done more to prevent the January 6 attack.
Ms Navaroli testified that she was at her wit’s end when Twitter executives refused to step in as Mr Trump’s rhetoric escalated before Jan. 6.
Her team created a “coded incitement to use force” policy to censor accounts, but Twitter executives declined to approve it, she said.
“On January 5, with the policy still pending, I chaired a meeting where one of my colleagues asked management if someone needed to be shot before we could remove tweets,” she testified. “Another colleague looked up live tweets and read them to management to try to convince them of the seriousness of the problem. Still nothing has been done.”
After Jan. 6, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol and injured more than 150 police officers, Ms Navaroli asked management “if they wanted more blood on their hands.”
Former Twitter executives denied that the FBI ordered them to block the New York Post article.
Former Twitter executive Jack Dorsey has already admitted to Congress that the company was wrong in banning the Post article, and the former executives, who testified Wednesday, reiterated that the company shouldn’t have done so should.
However, the former executives testified that while the decision was partly in response to FBI warnings about possible Russian misinformation, the government had not directly pressured the social media platform to block the article, a key Republican allegation .
“I am not aware of any unlawful collusion with, or direction from, any government agency or political campaign on how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation,” said James Baker, former Twitter assistant general counsel.
Rep. Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican and Judiciary Committee chairman, said he believes Twitter executives looked for a reason to censor the article before the election because they were biased. He quoted a tweet from an executive comparing members of the Trump administration to “Nazis.”
“I think you guys were played,” Mr. Jordan said, adding, “I think you guys wanted to take it down. I think you were played by the FBI.”
A Twitter executive had to relocate because of threats.
Yoel Roth, a former head of trust and safety at Twitter, testified that he had to sell his house and move after becoming the target of online harassment.
Mr Roth resigned from Twitter in the weeks following Elon Musk’s purchase of the company in October. After writing one Opinion column for the New York Times who criticized Mr Musk’s strategy, his internal emails became the focus of the so-called Twitter filesa series of media reports based on Twitter documents that Mr Musk has directed the company to make available to several journalists.
The release of the Twitter files suggested the platform was seeking advice from the FBI and other government officials regarding content moderation issues, leading to online harassment of Mr. Roth.
Other former Twitter employees had also shared their personal information online during the release of the Twitter files, Mr Roth said, prompting further harassment.
“These are the consequences of this type of harassment and speech,” he said.
Luke Broadwater reported from Washington, and Kate Conger from San Francisco.
