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Republicans Humiliate Themselves At Twitter Hearings
Posted
February 10, 2023
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February 10, 2023
32,340
2,762
248
9.31%
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Republicans in Congress held hearings with former Twitter employees and a whistleblower from the company this week in an attempt to prove that Twitter influenced the 2020 election by "suppressing" the Hunter Biden laptop story. Instead, they got a massive reality check when it was revealed that Donald Trump actively tried to get Twitter to silence and ban his biggest critics. This flies in the face of EVERYTHING Republicans wanted to prove about the private company, as Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains.
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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
This week was not a very good week for Republicans in Congress. Not only did they, uh, get made to be fools during President Biden's State of the Union address, but they also held a series of hearings that did not go the way that they thought they would. Specifically, of course, I am talking about the Twitter hearings that were in fact, based on the Twitter files, where Republicans thought they were gonna show the country how liberals and Democrats and the government were censoring Republicans on the social media outlet. But instead, what they got was a lesson in, be careful what you wish for, cuz it turns out the only government official that was actually actively trying to censor tweets was in fact Donald Trump while he was president of the United States. So here is the clip, take it away.
The White House almost immediately thereafter, contact the Twitter to demand the tweet be taken down. Is that accurate?
Thank you for the question. In my role, I was not responsible for receiving any sort of request from the government. However, what I was privy to was my supervisors letting us know that we had received something along those lines or something of a request. In that particular instance, I do remember hearing that we had received a request from the White House to make sure that we evaluated this tweet and that they wanted it to come down because it was a derogatory statement directly towards
The President. They wanted it to come down. They made that request.
To my recollection, yes,
I thought that was an inappropriate action by a government official, let alone the White House. But it wasn't Joe Biden about his son's laptop, it was Donald Trump because he didn't like what Chrissy Tegan had to say about him. Is that correct?
Yes, that is correct.
My, my I um, you ever think it's appropriate for the President of the United States to direct or otherwise influence a social media company to take down it's content?
I think it's a very slippery slope.
Mr. Roth, Ms. Gaddy, Mr. Baker, any evidence that Joe Biden's ever done that? Certainly none that I'm aware of. No, I don't recall anything like that. I'm sorry, the, that President Biden did what, sir, has Joe Biden ever called Twitter to your knowledge or his White House at his best to take down content or urge you to take down content? I don't know the answer to that question, sir. Well, I, I'm gonna have to conclude at least from three of the four. You don't know. There's no evidence he's ever done that. But there's plenty of evidence. Donald J. Trump tried to do that. And, um, if we're gonna have a hearing about the misuse of social media and the intrusion of government in the content on social media, we've got an environment rich target. But it's not Joe Biden. It's Donald J. Trump. And of course, we don't want to talk about that. We don't want to talk.
You know, what's really interesting about this, it's not just that those Republicans got their behinds handed to them there. It's also that all of those so-called journalists that have been working on the Twitter files, uh, with the exception I will say of Lee Fong with the Intercept. Um, why didn't any of y'all catch that? Huh? Why didn't y'all pick that up?
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