by (The Center Square)
US Rep. Dan Bishop is using Twitter to reveal how the company worked with the FBI to silence free speech, the latest in a series of posts that have garnered significant social media attention.
“The FBI sought to access internal Twitter data to silence constitutionally protected speech and increase their spying and censorship regime,” the North Carolina Republican posted Thursday, along with a video clip from a recent House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing. “The Twitter files only tell part of the story. How much pressure has the FBI put on other social media platforms that have more users and influence?
The Twitter files refer to thousands of internal Twitter documents disclosed by CEO Elon Musk and journalists Matt Taibbi, Barry Weiss and others that reveal how the company handled a number of issues. This includes its moderation process for a New York Post article on the Hunter Biden laptop controversy; Shadow Prohibition; Donald Trump suspended from podium; and FBI communication with the company’s trust and safety team.
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Posted the video Bishop on Thursday included testimony from George Washington University Professor Jonathan Turley, a nationally recognized constitutional legal scholar.
“The question that comes to me is this,” Bishop says in a 1-minute, 52-second video clip of the committee hearing. “How does the FBI, sworn to protect the Constitution, justify the intensive application of its resources, agents, etc., to force social media platforms to use those standards to remove constitutionally protected speech?”
Apart from the legal issues, Turley replied that there are bigger questions at play.
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“It’s a particularly ominous thing to have a chief law enforcement agency playing this role, an agency with incredible powers,” he said. “Here you’re looking for citizens that the government is supposed to silence and target. Whether that triggers an agency relationship is a problem in and of itself.
“Do we want to go back to the day when governments created lists like that?” Tarle questioned.
Bishop’s post generated more than 70,000 views with more than 1,800 likes and 660 retweets in about 17 hours.
One of his Dec. 20 tweets about the 4,155-page, $1.7 trillion spending bill now has more than 24 million views. It was a tweet telling the world that he and his team were reading the bill and posting “some of the most horrific provisions.” Subsequent tweets generated hundreds of thousands to more than 1 million views each.
One of the follow-ups said, “The omnibus has more than $15 billion in earmarks. That’s about 700 additional pages — more than 7,000 total devoted by both parties.
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A January 10 tweet, Friday, pinned on Congress’s page. “The Deep State is on notice,” it says, referring to House Resolution 12, which calls for an investigation into the collection and sharing of information by the US government and private companies. Of late, it has garnered more than 500,000 views.
Other bishop posts have also been popular on Twitter in recent weeks. In a Jan. 2 tweet, Congressman Rep. Kevin McCarthy asked why his terms package was not received at least 72 hours in advance. McCarthy needed 15 rounds of voting to become speaker of the chamber.
A post banning President Joe Biden’s State of the Union on Tuesday has generated more than 41,000 views and nearly 850 likes:This meeting may be by email” Wrote the Bishop.
Syndicated with permission from The Center Square.
