House Judiciary subpoenas Big Tech on feds ‘censorship’ collusion

WASHINGTON — The House Judiciary Committee issued subpoenas Wednesday requiring Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft to hand over records regarding “censorship” collaboration with the US government.

Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) set a March 23 deadline for the companies to hand over content removal communications with and regarding the executive branch.

“To develop effective legislation, such as the possible enactment of new statutory limits on the Executive Branch’s ability to work with Big Tech to restrict the circulation of content and deplatform users, the Committee on the Judiciary must first understand how and to what extent the Executive Branch coerced and colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor speech,” Jordan wrote in letters to the five companies.

“To this end, we have asked for communications between [your company] and the Executive Branch, internal [company] communications discussing communications from the Executive Branch, and [company] communications with third parties that may have been working with the Executive Branch, in addition to other key information,” Jordan wrote.

Jordan, who leads both the Judiciary Committee and its subcommittee looking into the “weaponization” of government, said that the legally binding subpoenas were issued because “[y]our response without compulsory process has been woefully inadequate.”

The letters praise new Twitter CEO Elon Musk, who took over the platform in October and weeks later released internal documents detailing historic censorship decisions and extensive collaboration between the FBI and Twitter employees.

“Twitter recently set a benchmark for how transparent Big Tech companies can be about interactions with government over censorship. The Twitter Files have exposed how Big Tech and the federal government have worked hand in hand in ways that undermine First Amendment principles,” Jordan wrote.

“Numerous internal documents from Twitter reflect the weaponization of the federal government’s power to censor speech online. It is necessary for Congress to gauge the extent to which this occurred at [your company] as well.”

The letters were addressed to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google SEO Sundar Pichai and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

In a statement, the Republican-led Judiciary Committee said, “Congress has an important role in protecting and advancing fundamental free speech principles, including by examining how private actors coordinate with the government to to suppress First Amendment-protected speech. These subpoenas are the first step in holding Big Tech accountable.”

Federal government-requested censorship was common and often openly discussed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Authorities part of or recently retired from the US intelligence and national security bureaucracies also leaned on companies to squelch alleged foreign activity in US elections following the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential race — though that speech often was domestic.

Much about the government’s censorship collaboration with the private sector remains unclear, but critics say the First Amendment bars officials from directing companies to curb domestic speech.

The FBI paid Twitter $3.5 million from October 2019 to February 2021 to process its moderation requests, according to a document released by Musk.

Other major tech companies engaged with the government regularly, particularly Facebook.

House Judiciary Committee Republicans alleged in November that the FBI receives “private user information from Facebook” through a “partisan” endeavor likely known as Operation Bronze Griffin, “but without the user’s consent or the legal process the FBI would otherwise need to independently pursue such user-related information.”

The Intercept in October exposed an online portal through which authorities with a government or law enforcement email address reportedly can request the removal of “misinformation” from Facebook or Instagram.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told The Post that West Wing staff don’t use the Facebook portal, even though her predecessor Jen Psaki said last year that the White House was “flagging” alleged misinformation to Facebook.

The Intercept reported that content flagged by the Department of Homeland Security through the gateway included “parody accounts or accounts with virtually no followers or influence.”

Civil libertarians, including the American Civil Liberties Union blasted the Facebook portal as a probable violation of Americans’ free speech rights, with the ACLU tweeting, “The First Amendment bars the government from deciding for us what is true or false, online or anywhere.”

Opponents of online censorship note that speech deemed “misinformation” can later gain widespread acceptance. For example, Facebook banned discussion of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s possible role in the COVID-19 pandemic until mid-2021. Federal officials who steered funding to risky research the lab said it was an unfounded conspiracy theory, but one that later gained broader credibility — including from US spy agencies — as one of two plausible explanations for the origin of the pandemic that has killed more than 1 million Americans.

Twitter didn’t receive a subpoena amid Musk’s campaign to publicize historical documents, which have sparked many still-unanswered questions.

Former Twitter executives last week testified to the House Oversight Committee that they could not remember key details regarding the platform’s October 2020 suppression of The Post’s reporting about documents from Hunter Biden’s laptop that link President Biden to his family’s overseas business deals in China and Ukraine.