Senator Cory Gardner (R-CO) grilled the CEO of Twitter for failing to censor the tweets of Iran’s supreme leader while incessantly going after President Donald Trump’s.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on October 28. The “Does Section 230’s Sweeping Immunity Enable Big Tech Bad Behavior?” hearing featured questioning of these Big Tech CEOs led by Chairman and Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss).
“I just don’t understand how you can label a president of the United States. Have you ever taken a tweet down from the Ayatollah?” Gardner asked Dorsey at the hearing. “We’ve certainly labelled tweets, and I believe we have taken one down as well,” Dorsey responded.
The official committee website stated the aim of the hearing was “to modernize the decades-old law [Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act], increase transparency and accountability among big technology companies for their content moderation practices, and explore the impact of large ad-tech platforms on local journalism and consumer privacy.”
Republican lawmakers have argued fiercely that social media companies should be forums for free speech and that Big Tech should not be arbiters of truth on platforms. On Oct. 14 when the NY Post shared a bombshell exposé reportedly linking the former Vice President Joe Biden and his family to corrupt activities, both Twitter and Facebook made concerted efforts to stifle the report’s distribution.
“I just don’t understand how Twitter can claim to want a world of less hate and misinformation, while you simultaneously let the kind of content that the Ayatollah has tweeted out flourish on the platform,” stated Gardner.
Gardner pointed to tweets from the Ayatollah that included holocaust denialism and calls for the complete destruction of the Israeli state. Gardner noted that each tweet mentioned was not flagged by Twitter.
“It’s no wonder that Americans are concerned about politically-motivated content moderation at Twitter,” Gardner rebuked.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representative and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
