Three former Twitter executives are testifying Wednesday at the House Oversight Committee over Twitter’s decision to temporarily suppress a New York Post story regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop, in what’s set to be the first high-profile hearing for the new Republican majority investigating President Joe Biden’s administration and family.
House Oversight Chairman James Comer – a Kentucky Republican who has launched a broad investigation into the Biden family’s business dealings – is probing the social media giant in the wake of Twitter’s new owner and CEO Elon Musk releasing internal communications from Twitter staff about the decision to temporarily block users from sharing the New York Post story in the closing weeks of the 2020 presidential election campaign season.
The hearing is the first time that Twitter’s former Deputy Counsel James Baker, also a former top official at the FBI, will speak publicly since Musk fired him in December.
Musk himself has suggested that the internal communications released as part of his so-called “Twitter files” show government censorship, suggesting Twitter acted “under orders from the government” when it suppressed the laptop story. The “Twitter files” have fueled Comer’s belief that the government may have been involved in the suppression of the story.
“We basically want to know what the Twitter policy was with respect to how they determined what was disinformation,” Comer said. “We want to know what role the government played in encouraging Twitter to suppress certain stories and certain Twitter accounts. We want to know if and how much tax dollars were spent from federal agencies to Twitter because that’s kind of what we look into – tax dollars.”
CNN has previously reported, however, that allegations the FBI told Twitter to suppress the story are unsupported, and a half a dozen…
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