One day after partisan tensions marked President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address to Congress, this Wednesday there was another episode that exposed the deep and growing polarization between Republicans and Democrats, the radical gap between both and the line of siege on Biden that the Republicans now in control of the Lower House will continue for the next two years.
He Oversight Committee has held a strained view centered on the alleged collusion between the government and Twitter to suppress an article that in October 2020, a few days before the presidential elections, ‘The New York Post’ published about Hunter Biden. In that piece, the propagation of which was blocked by the social network, The son of the president was pointed out for having put a businessman in Ukraine in contact with his father. The source for the accusations was a computer hard drive that Rudy Giuliani, lawyer for Donald Trumphe provided after taking it from a store where the president’s son had left it for repairs.
Already in the past and repeatedly Twitter executives acknowledged that the decisions made in that case were a “mistake & rdquor;, and suspended accounts were restored. The matter, however, never disappeared from the discourse of the right, which used it to accuse collusion of government agencies with the Democrats and to intensify their accusations of “censorship” and of the alleged discrimination from social media and big tech to voices and points of view Republicans and Conservatives.
He regained strength again when Elon Musk bought the social network, giving access to internal company documents to journalists, who in December published the calls “Twitter files & rdquor;. And although in references to Hunter Biden’s computer, the reporter Matt Taibbi assured that he had found no evidence of collusion, the Republicans have finally managed to bring it to Congress.
Vijaya Gadda, James Baker, and Yoel Roth, three of the former directors of the social network, who were fired when Musk arrived, have appeared in the session. And they have reiterated their admission of errors in the case but have also strongly denied acting under pressure from the FBI or the Biden Administration.
“False scandal”
The democratsnow in a minority in the Committee, have spoken of a “false scandal & rdquor; and have denounced theobsession” of the republicans with this case and with the denunciations of supposed discrimination in networks. In contrast, they have tried to highlight the Permissiveness that Twitter had with Donald Trump and its spread of misinformation. “Prior to January 6th, Twitter decided to allow Trump and countless MAGA extremists to use their platform to propagate ridicule. Big lie (of electoral fraud) and misinformation about the elections And soon the internet was filled with incitements to civil war, civil war, insurrection, revolution and mass violence,” said Congressman Jamie Raskin. (Although the social network suspended Trump’s account after the assault on the Capitol, Musk restored it in November, and has also reactivated that of extremist congressmen like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was suspended for spreading disinformation about Covid).
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The Democrats have called as a witness Anika Collier Navaroli, a former Twitter employeeHe collaborated with the special committee that investigated the assault on the Capitol. and she has confirmed in an interrogation of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that the network changed its policies to accommodate a racist tweet from the former president in which he attacked the New Yorker and three other progressive congresswomen and urged them to “return to the crime-ridden countries from which they came.”
The hearing (which has suffered a temporary suspension due to an electrical failure) has also revealed that T himselfTrump tried from the White House to pressurera the social network so that suspend model Chrissy Teigen’s account after she triple insulted him in a tweet.