[House Hearing, 119 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
THE CENSORSHIP-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY
U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED NINETEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2025
__________
Serial No. 119-4
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on the Judiciary
GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT
Available via: http://judiciary.house.gov
_______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
58-900 WASHINGTON : 2025
COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY
JIM JORDAN, Ohio, Chair
DARRELL ISSA, California JAMIE RASKIN, Maryland, Ranking
ANDY BIGGS, Arizona Member
TOM McCLINTOCK, California JERROLD NADLER, New York
THOMAS P. TIFFANY, Wisconsin ZOE LOFGREN, California
THOMAS MASSIE, Kentucky STEVE COHEN, Tennessee
CHIP ROY, Texas HENRY C. ``HANK'' JOHNSON, Jr.,
SCOTT FITZGERALD, Wisconsin Georgia
BEN CLINE, Virginia ERIC SWALWELL, California
LANCE GOODEN, Texas TED LIEU, California
JEFFERSON VAN DREW, New Jersey PRAMILA JAYAPAL, Washington
TROY E. NEHLS, Texas J. LUIS CORREA, California
BARRY MOORE, Alabama MARY GAY SCANLON, Pennsylvania
KEVIN KILEY, California JOE NEGUSE, Colorado
HARRIET M. HAGEMAN, Wyoming LUCY McBATH, Georgia
LAUREL M. LEE, Florida DEBORAH K. ROSS, North Carolina
WESLEY HUNT, Texas BECCA BALINT, Vermont
RUSSELL FRY, South Carolina JESUS G. ``CHUY'' GARCIA, Illinois
GLENN GROTHMAN, Wisconsin SYDNEY KAMLAGER-DOVE, California
BRAD KNOTT, North Carolina JARED MOSKOWITZ, Florida
MARK HARRIS, North Carolina DANIEL S. GOLDMAN, New York
ROBERT F. ONDER, Jr., Missouri JASMINE CROCKETT, Texas
DEREK SCHMIDT, Kansas
BRANDON GILL, Texas
MICHAEL BAUMGARTNER, Washington
CHRISTOPHER HIXON, Majority Staff Director
JULIE TAGEN, Minority Staff Director
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C O N T E N T S
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Wednesday, February 12, 2025
OPENING STATEMENTS
Page
The Honorable Jim Jordan, Chair of the Committee on the Judiciary
from the State of Ohio......................................... 1
The Honorable Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the Committee on
the Judiciary from the State of Maryland....................... 3
WITNESSES
Rupa Subramanya, Journalist, The Free Press
Oral Testimony................................................. 8
Prepared Testimony............................................. 12
Michael Shellenberger, CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship, and
Free Speech, University of Austin, Founder, Public News
Oral Testimony................................................. 17
Prepared Testimony............................................. 19
Matt Taibbi, Editor, Racket News
Oral Testimony................................................. 30
Prepared Testimony............................................. 32
Craig Aaron, Co-CEO, Free Press Action
Oral Testimony................................................. 34
Prepared Testimony............................................. 36
LETTERS, STATEMENTS, ETC. SUBMITTED FOR THE HEARING
All materials submitted for the record by the Committee on the
Judiciary are listed below..................................... 121
An article entitled, ``Shellenberger: USAID Paid for Trump
Impeachment Effort,'' Feb. 6, 2025, Newsmax, submitted by the
Honorable Thomas Massie, a Member of the Committee on the
Judiciary from the State of Kentucky, for the record
Materials submitted by the Honorable Jasmine Crockett, a Member
of the Committee on the Judiciary from the State of Texas, for
the record
An excerpt from a transcribed interview, May 16, 2023
An excerpt from a transcribed interview, May 22, 2023
An excerpt from a transcribed interview, May 31, 2023
An excerpt from a transcribed interview, Jun. 14, 2023
An excerpt from a transcribed interview, Jun. 16, 2023
An excerpt from a transcribed interview, Jun. 20, 2023
An excerpt from a transcribed interview, Jun. 21, 2023
An excerpt from a transcribed interview, Jun. 22, 2023
An excerpt from a transcribed interview, Jun. 23, 2023
An excerpt from a transcribed interview, Jun. 26, 2023
An excerpt from a transcribed interview, Jun. 28, 2023
An excerpt from a transcribed interview, Jul. 19, 2023
An excerpt from a transcribed interview, Sept. 19, 2023
An excerpt from a transcribed interview, Mar. 1, 2024
An excerpt from a transcribed interview, Apr. 11, 2024
A letter to the Honorable Jim Jordan, Chair of the Committee on
the Judiciary from the State of Ohio, Aug. 26, 2024, from Mark
Zuckerberg, Founder Chair & CEO, Meta Platforms, Inc.,
submitted by the Honorable Lance Gooden, a Member of the
Committee on the Judiciary from the State of Texas, for the
record
Materials submitted by the Honorable Daniel S. Goldman, a Member
of the Committee on the Judiciary from the State of New York,
for the record
A Syllabus, Murthy, Surgeon General, et al. v. Missouri, et
al., Oct. Term 2023, The Supreme Court
An article entitled, ``Elon Musk's Business Empire Scores
Benefits Under Trump Shake-Up,'' Feb. 11, 2025, The New
York Times
A letter to Honorable Michael E. Horowitz, Inspector General,
U.S. Department of Justice, Feb. 12, 2025, from Members of
Congress, submitted by the Honorable Jared Moskowitz, a Member
of the Committee on the Judiciary from the State of Florida,
for the record
An article entitled, ``EU Law Sets the Stage for a Clash Over
Disinformation,'' Sept. 27, 2023, The New York Times, submitted
by the Honorable Jim Jordan, Chair of the Committee on the
Judiciary from the State of Ohio, for the record
Materials submitted by the Honorable Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member
of the Committee on the Judiciary from the State of Maryland,
for the record
An article entitled, ``Trump also tried to suppress free
speech on Twitter,'' Feb. 9, 2023,Washington Examiner
An article entitled, ``Twitter Kept Entire `Database' of
Republican Requests to Censor Posts,'' Feb. 8, 2023,
Rolling Stone
An article entitled, ``Trump Admin Tells Facebook to Remove
Posts About Tearing Down Statues,'' Jun. 26, 2020,
Business Insider
An article entitled, ``Twitter Files' Matt Taibbi Says Elon
Musk Sent Him Unhinged Messages,'' Feb. 16, 2024, The New
Republic
An article entitled, ``Connecting the Dots, Donald Trump's
Tightening Grip on Press Freedom,'' Feb. 6, 2025, Just
Security
An article entitled, ``Musk touts DOGE transparency but
downplays his ownpotential conflicts of interest,'' Feb.
11, 2025, CNN
An article entitled, ``Yes, the Trump White House Demanded
Twitter Remove Chrissy Teigen's Tweet,'' Feb. 8, 2023,
Vanity Fair
A letter from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting
Project, Feb. 12, 2025, to the House Judiciary Committee
An article entitled, ``AP statement on Oval Office access,'' Feb.
11, 2025, The Associated Press, submitted by the Honorable Mary
Gay Scanlon, a Member of the Committee on the Judiciary from
the State of Pennsylvania, for the record
THE CENSORSHIP-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
----------
Wednesday, February 12, 2025
House of Representatives
Committee on the Judiciary
Washington, DC
The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:08 a.m., in
Room 2141, Rayburn House Office Building, the Hon. Jim Jordan
[Chair of the Committee] presiding.
Members present: Representatives Jordan, Issa, Biggs,
McClintock, Tiffany, Massie, Fitzgerald, Cline, Gooden, Van
Drew, Nehls, Moore, Kiley, Hageman, Lee, Hunt, Fry, Grothman,
Knott, Harris, Onder, Schmidt, Gill, Baumgartner, Raskin,
Nadler, Lofgren, Cohen, Johnson, Swalwell, Lieu, Jayapal,
Correa, Scanlon, McBath, Ross, Balint, Garcia, Kamlager-Dove,
Moskowitz, Goldman, and Crockett.
Chair Jordan. [Presiding.] The Committee will come to
order.
Without objection, the Chair is authorized to declare a
recess at any time.
We welcome everyone to today's hearing on the Censorship-
Industrial Complex.
The Chair now recognizes the gentleman from North Carolina,
Mr. Knott, to lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance.
All. I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States
of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one
Nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for
all.
Chair Jordan. We appreciate everyone being here today for
this important hearing.
We will start with opening statements. The Chair is
recognized.
What a difference a few years make. Four years ago,
President Trump was banned from all platforms--Twitter,
Facebook, and YouTube. Today, he has his own platform; he is
back on all the others, and, of course, he is President of the
United States.
Four years ago, Democrat Members of Congress sent a letter
to telecommunication companies pressuring them to kick Fox and
Newsmax off of cable network. Today, both are still on; both
are doing fine. Fox has more viewers than MSNBC and CNN
combined.
Four years ago, the White House was actively pressuring big
tech to censor Americans. You don't have to take my word for
it. Mark Zuckerberg wrote the Committee a letter, told us it
was going on.
He said the Biden Administration pressured us to censor. We
did it. We're sorry. We ain't going to do it anymore.
Today, they have changed their policies, got rid of the
independent fact checkers, and actually embraced the First
Amendment. Imagine that.
Maybe the best example of what they were doing happened on
the third day of the administration, an example we have
highlighted many times in this Committee in the last Congress.
The third day of the Biden Administration, there was an email
sent from Clark Humphrey to Twitter.
The email said,
I wanted to flag the below tweet and we hope you can get moving
on the process for having it removed ASAP.
Take down this tweet as soon as possible.
Who was the tweet by? Who did the tweet? The guy who is
going to be named Secretary of Health and Human Services here
sometime this week, Robert F. Kennedy, who just happened to be
the guy who was going to run against the very people trying to
take down the tweet.
What did the tweet say?
Hank Aaron's tragic death is part of a wave of suspicious
deaths among elderly. Closely following administration of [the]
. . . vaccine.
He received the vaccine on January 5th to inspire other Black
Americans to get the vaccine.
There is not one thing in that two-sentence tweet that is
not true. Absolutely true. The Biden Administration was
pressuring to take it down. The term--actually, it is Mr.
Shellenberger's term--``The Censorship-Industrial Complex,''
that's what it is right there, front and center, and it is much
broader than that.
By the way, the guy who authored this tweet is going to be
voted by the U.S. Senate to be the next Secretary of Health and
Human Services. We had him as a witness in front of this
Committee two years ago. When RFK, Jr., came in to testify,
Democrats made a motion to go to an Executive Session.
Executive Session, kick everyone out, so that no one could hear
what RFK, Jr., was going to testify to in a hearing on
censorship. You can't make this stuff up.
Two years ago, we learned that 51 former intel officials
lied to the country when they said the Hunter Biden laptop
story had ``all the classic earmarks of a Russian information
operation.'' Today, all 51 of those people have lost their
security clearance.
A few years ago, GARM, the misnamed Global Alliance for
Responsible Media, was coordinating an effort with major
advertisers to limit ads on conservative platforms and
websites. Today, GARM is out of business. Climate Action 100 a
few years ago coordinated an effort to financial institutions
to pressure companies to reduce oil and gas emissions and
production. Today, Climate Action 100, out of business. A few
years ago, the Stanford Internet Observatory was working.
Today, they're out of business. NZAM was doing the same thing a
few years ago. Today, they stopped operation.
What a difference a few years can make. So much of this
change started in October 2022, when Elon Musk purchased
Twitter. I think he said something like: I didn't spend $44
billion to buy Twitter. I spent $44 billion to save the First
Amendment.
Of course, that effort began with the Twitter Files. Two of
the Twitter Files' authors are with us today as witnesses.
Matt Taibbi wrote the very first Twitter File and I think
11 or 12 others. Over the time that all that information was
coming out, Mr. Shellenberger was also an author, and as I said
earlier, he is the guy who coined the term, ``The Censorship-
Industrial Complex,'' big government working with big
universities, working with other government agencies, the White
House working in all this, pressuring big tech to censor
Americans' speech.
Both Democrats, both award-winning journalists, both
Democrats at the time when they testified last Congress, both
award-winning journalists, both testified multiple times in
front of this Committee last Congress. What was their reward
for coming forward and defending the First Amendment?
They were attacked. They were referred to in this Committee
as ``so-called journalists,'' even though they have won all
kinds of awards and are best-selling authors. They were asked
to disclose their sources in a hearing by Democrats in front of
this Committee, and they were named personally in a letter by
the FTC Chair, Lina Khan, when Ms. Khan asked Elon Musk, ``Who
were the journalists you were talking to?''
Of course, maybe most importantly, we all remember that, at
the very moment Matt Taibbi was testifying in front of this
Committee, the IRS was knocking on his door. Just one big
coincidence. At the very time, the very time he is talking to
this Committee, testifying in front of this Committee, the IRS
was knocking on his door.
Ms. Subramanya was targeted for covering the trucker
blockade in Canada. She also testified last year in front of
this Committee, and she warned us--she was ahead of her time--
she warned us about what was coming in Europe and around the
world with the censorship efforts we are seeing in other
Western Nations.
One of the things she said when she testified almost two
years ago, she said, ``What is under threat is a core value of
Western civilization.'' Never forget that powerful statement,
and that is what is at stake here.
So, I appreciate the work you have all done; what we have
been able to uncover. We appreciate the work of the President
and Mr. Musk, and what he started with the Twitter Files, and
then, what we were able to do with all these other platforms,
and the dramatic change we have seen.
I am nervous about what is happening in Europe because of
the Digital Services Act they are using to pressure tech
companies to censor globally, which impacts Americans as well.
This is something the Committee is going to look into as we
move forward.
I want to thank you all for being here today.
With that, I would recognize the Ranking Member for his
opening statement.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thanks to all our witnesses today.
The wrecking ball of Right-wing authoritarianism is
swinging right through Congress and coming directly at the
freedoms of the press and the people right now. The self-
appointed CEO of this operation is the unelected bureaucrat and
aspiring techno-dictator Elon Musk, who Steve Bannon calls,
A truly evil individual trying to create a techno-State in
which he's king and most of us are reduced to the status of
serfs. Break things, and break things fast.
Steve Bannon says is Musk's MO.
De Facto President Musk and his nocturnal DOGE Muskovite
youth brigade have now taken control of dozens of Federal
computer data bases to dismantle entire Federal agencies and
programs that we, in Congress, created and funded with
appropriations to keep our people safe and secure and healthy.
Just this week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,
the agency that lowered overdraft fees from $38-$5 and cut
credit card late fees from an average of $32-$8 for American
consumers, saving us billions of dollars, an agency that has
actually stopped corporate rip-off artists from stealing $21
billion from us, got a stop work order from Elon Musk.
The billionaire plutocrats want to dismantle the EPA, which
protects our air and water, and the NIH, which promotes
lifesaving scientific and medical research.
Yesterday, Donald Trump banned the Associated Press, a 179-
year-old newspaper organization, from the White House because
it declines to call the Gulf of Mexico ``The Gulf of America.''
This is straight-up press censorship based on retaliatory
viewpoint discrimination.
Trump's DOD kicked out eight news groups that had space in
the Pentagon, but which asked skeptical questions of the new
Secretary, including The New York Times, NBC News, and the
Washington Post, all ousted in favor of outlets willing to
faithfully advance the party line of the State, like Breitbart
and One America News Network.
Mr. Chair, I despair sometimes when I reflect how far this
war on representative democracy and the Rights of the press and
the people has already gone and how far it might go. Then, Mr.
Chair, I confess, I think about you. I think about you because
you and I, a MAGA Republican, a conservative Republican, and a
liberal Democrat have always shared a common commitment to the
First Amendment. This gives me hope. As you've put it, quote,
``The First Amendment is first for a reason. Without it, we
cannot enjoy our other liberties.''
So, I tell myself that, if things got really bad here, if
we begin to look more like Orban's illiberal democracy in
Hungary or Putin's Russia, where journalists end up in prison
for their writings and young people are jailed for expressing
antiwar sentiments, and opposition leaders like Alexei Navalny
are poisoned and die mysteriously in jail, or Kim Jong Un's
North Korea, or Xi's China, authoritarian dictatorships where
all must worship the orders of the ``dear deified leader.'' I
will call on you, as a colleague, Chair Jordan, whom I have
known to work seriously across the aisle sometimes, to come
defend political freedom in America.
These are dark times, but in the past, we have agreed
strongly on the fundamental importance of free speech, free
press, the Right to assemble, the Right to petition for redress
of grievances, free exercise of religion, and no establishment
of a State religion.
I'm proud that you and I worked together to move the PRESS
Act, which passed this Committee unanimously and the House by
voice vote last Congress, to protect reporters against
compulsory disclosure of their sources and their notes. You
supported my resolution against blasphemy laws around the world
used to torment Christians, Hindus, Muslims, and free thinkers
everywhere.
We have clashed vigorously and we, no doubt, will continue
to do so through this very difficult period, but forgive me if
I quote Abraham Lincoln, the great founder of your Party, who
said,
We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. Though
passion may have strained, it must not break the bonds of
affection.
I hope we can call on these bonds if Elon Musk or anyone else
in the Executive Branch seeks to destroy our Constitutional
freedoms and the powers of Congress.
Although this hearing has been arranged to belabor a rather
tiresome point that has been made ad nauseam for the last
several years, it actually gestures at an important issue;
specifically, whether social media platforms like Meta and X
should be treated as common carriers and pushed to be open to
all speakers and all content, regardless of how dangerous or
extreme or false it may be, or whether they should be seen as
private speakers who have their own freedom to exclude any
content that violates their own policies, the way that
newspapers and TV stations do.
It is a fascinating problem, but it is clear as a matter of
law that these are private entities and speakers who control
their own speech, despite the fact that they are protected by
Section 230, which immunizes them from liability for other
people's defamation and fraud and other criminal and tortuous
communications posted on their platforms.
The status of 230 is something we have discussed that we
should seriously examine in a thoughtful way, since the
internet has clearly gotten off the ground and doesn't need
this kind of subsidy anymore.
What I insist on is that we be consistent in our treatment
of the tech giants. You pushed them hard, Mr. Chair, to remove
objective fact-checking and to let all the extreme Right-wing
forces get back on the internet. You pushed for an absolute and
wide-open market in speech, but, then, you should push them
equally hard not to censor dissenting viewpoints, whether they
come from the anti-immigration wing of the MAGA movement, like
Steve Bannon or Laura Loomer, who says she has been shadow-
banned on X by Elon Musk, or from the populous left, as when
Musk purged his platform of journalists critical of him and
other accounts critical of him back in 2022.
Even one of your own witnesses today, Mr. Taibbi, was
privately censored or de-amplified by Elon Musk, and I assume
must walk on eggshells now not to get kicked off of that
platform, but I will be interested to hear what he says about
it.
If you use our Congressional bully pulpit to stand up for
the Rights of extreme Right-wing speakers on these private
platforms, you should stand up for the Rights of anti-Musk
speakers to be on that platform, too.
Right now, the issue is this: We face a profound First
Amendment crisis in the actions taken by this administration.
One of my constituents who is serving in the Armed Forces, Mr.
Chair, alerted me this past Friday to book bans by the
government in their kids' Department of Defense school, where
they are closing the library for a week to complete a purge of
books that appear to offend the new government orthodoxy
against DEI and gender ideology. That's fine if you hate those
ideologies, whatever you think they are, but this is naked
content and viewpoint censorship of books.
I hope you will join me in denouncing the purge of books,
the stripping of books from the Department of Defense
libraries, or any other public libraries in America or for
American citizens.
When this father saw a school official removing not just
books, but posters of Susan B. Anthony and Dr. King, my
constituent asked why they left up the poster of Leonardo da
Vinci, and he was told, ``That's a real historical figure.''
More sweepingly, Trump and his FCC are using their powers
to investigate, sue, and threaten news groups that dare to
criticize the administration. Trump is suing CBS for $20
billion in damages because--check this out--he believes an
interview with Kamala Harris produced too favorable an
impression of her. So, that means that I could sue Fox News
because I think their interviews with Trump produce too
favorable an impression of him. I mean, this is lunacy.
Now, exploiting his asserted unitary Executive powers,
Trump is unleashing his sycophant FCC Chair Brendan Carr on
every news group whose stories he doesn't approve of actually
threatening to pull the government broadcast licenses for ABC,
CBS, NBC, PBS, and NPR. Nothing of a hostile nature, of course,
has taken place against Fox News, which is now the de facto
State-approved media and enjoys immunity from the repression
visited on its liberal competitors. What is this, North Korea?
It reminds me of the treatment of Michael Cohen, Donald
Trump's former private lawyer, who worked for Trump for more
than a decade and became Deputy Finance Chair of the RNC. He
went to jail for Donald Trump for, among other things, lying to
Congress and making unlawful corporate contributions in the
Stormy Daniels coverup affair.
When Cohen was released from prison during COVID to home
arrest and probation with an ankle bracelet, he was abruptly
rearrested and taken back to prison when he refused to sign a
statement saying he would not speak to the media or publish a
book about Donald Trump. Everybody's got to hear this. He was
thrown into solitary confinement, where he remained until a
United States District Court Judge found this to be a clear
First Amendment violation and an outrage, and freed him
immediately. What is this, Castro's Cuba? Putin's Russia?
The free speech violations taking place now against
Department of Justice prosecutors and FBI agents are equally
astounding. The First Amendment forbids reprisal and punishment
against professional government employees for political
reasons. Yet, Trump has fired and demoted dozens of Federal
prosecutors, many of whom he had appointed during his first
administration, simply for doing their jobs, including
prosecuting January 6th violators.
Trump's subordinates also asked for a roundup of
information about more than 6,000 hardworking FBI agents who
were assigned to work the January 6th probe. A dangerous,
blatantly unconstitutional order which was enjoined by a U.S.
District Court in a case brought by the Association of FBI
Agents.
The administration is attempting to do its work--I'm about
to finish up, Mr. Chair. Thank you.
Chair Jordan. I see a lot of pages there. I was just
wondering.
Mr. Raskin. Yes, I'm going to speak fast, like you. Watch
me do it. All right?
Look, this is happening in secret. They are keeping the
press, the Congress, and people in the dark. I know you feel as
strongly about government transparency as you do about free
speech.
Chair Jordan. Yes.
Mr. Raskin. The administration has illegally fired 17
inspector generals, totally violating the statute which says
they have got to come to Congress first 30 days before they
fire them and set forth the specific explanation for why that
is happening.
Now, finally, you and I are both fierce advocates for the
First Amendment and government transparency. Both of us see in
the First Amendment a right that protects everybody without
regard to viewpoint, substance, or politics of the message. If
we stand up strong for the First Amendment, if we defend not
just the speech we agree with, which is easy, but the speech we
oppose, which is hard, then we will be Constitutional patriots
and we will protect a truly free society.
When we together introduced our Free Flow of Information
Act, you said all rights protected in the First Amendment need
to be defended. We had real success. Let's work together again
to end the attacks on news organizations; to demand
transparency from the administration, and to allow every
American to exercise his or her free speech without being
intimidated, harassed, or prosecuted.
Thank you, and I yield back.
Chair Jordan. Without objection, all other opening
statements will be included in the record.
We will now introduce today's witnesses.
Mr. Matt Taibbi is a journalist, author, and founder of
Racket News. He reported on the original Twitter Files in 2022,
showing the Federal Government's pervasive involvement in the
companies' content moderation decisions. He is an author and
journalist who earned the National Magazine Award for
Commentary in 2008; the Izzy Award for Outstanding Independent
Journalism in 2020. He has authored 10 books, four of which
were The New York Times bestsellers. Mr. Taibbi testified twice
last Congress before the Select Subcommittee on the
Weaponization of the Federal Government.
We are glad to have you back.
Mr. Michael Shellenberger also reported on the original
Twitter Files in 2022. More recently, he released the Twitter
Files Brazil, which highlighted the Brazilian government's
attempt to censor dissenting opinions on X. Mr. Shellenberger
is the Founder and President of Environmental Progress, an
independent, nonprofit, research organization based in
Berkeley, California; the best-selling author of ``San
Fransicko'' and ``Apocalypse Never,'' and was named a Time
Magazine Hero of the Environment, and is a Green Book Award
winner. Last Congress he testified twice before our Committee
and before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the Brazilian
government's censorship efforts.
Ms. Rupa Subramanya is a Canadian journalist for The Free
Press who has written extensively about foreign censorship
laws. Her testimony before the Select Subcommittee in November
2023, warned of the coming censorship legislation in Canada,
Brazil, Ireland, France, and the EU. She has reported on the
weaponization of foreign hate speech laws to target voices that
dissent from liberal orthodoxy. The Free Press Founder Bari
Weiss wrote that, quote,
If there's one theme that runs through Rupa's work, it is this:
The urgent threat to our liberties by the combined power of
government and big tech.
Finally, Mr. Craig Aaron is the President and Co-CEO of
Free Press, not to be confused with The Free Press. Free Press
Action, a nonprofit organization that advocates on media and
technology policy. Prior to joining Free Press in 2004, he
worked as an investigative reporter at Public Citizen and was
the Managing Editor of In These Times, a biweekly political
magazine.
We welcome all our witnesses; thank them for appearing.
We will begin by swearing you in. Would you please rise and
raise your right hand?
[Witnesses sworn.]
Let the record reflect that the witnesses have answered in
the affirmative.
You can be seated. Thank you.
Again, thank you all for being here today. We really do
appreciate the work you have done over so many years and are
now coming back in some cases for your third time in front of
the Committee.
Please know that your written testimony will be entered
into the record in its entirety. Accordingly, we ask that you
summarize your testimony in five minutes.
We will start with Ms. Subramanya.
STATEMENT OF RUPA SUBRAMANYA
Ms. Subramanya. Thank you.
What if I were to ask you, what are the most repressive
governments around the world when it comes to freedom? Who
suppresses freedom of speech and enterprise the most? You'd
surely say North Korea, Iran, and Russia. What if I told you
Germany should be in that list, or for that matter, France, or
Canada, where I'm from, I should be on that list, too?
I'm not saying these countries are the same as the fear-
based authoritarian societies of North Korea and Iran, not by a
long shot, but I am suggesting that some of the free countries
are not, in fact, living up to their promises of liberty, and
that many allies of the U.S. have gotten in the habit of using
the government against political enemies or disfavored
companies.
In Scotland, hate crime legislation adopted last year
criminalizes anything that stirs up hatred against an array of
protected groups, including the disabled, the old, the LGBTQ
community, and others.
In Australia, the government started enacting hate crime
laws just last week that impose jail sentences on those who
display hateful symbols, like swastikas.
In Germany, authorities have ramped-up their policing of
online hate speech by arresting people who've made
``offensive'' posts and seizing their laptops and other
devices. Last year, the German government banned a far-Right
magazine for antihuman hate speech and agitation and shut down
a protest because the protesters were Irish and speaking Gaelic
rather than English or German.
In the UK, the police have taken to arresting people who
post videos on social media accounts deemed offensive. They've
been sent to jail for weeks and months at a time. As my
colleague Maddy Kearns reported for The Free Press, British
people have been arrested and convicted for ``antisocial
behavior,'' such as praying silently near abortion clinics. The
Orwellian Big Brother punishing you for expressing an impolitic
thought is now the law of the land in the land of Orwell.
In the European Union, the Digital Services Act bars the
dissemination of any content deemed harmful or illegal but
doesn't provide much clarity about what that is. Right now, EU
officials are going after Elon Musk, threatening his platform X
with fines because he endorsed the AfD (Alternative for
Germany) Party in Germany. Make no mistake, a precedent is
being set. In the future, other people with unpopular politics
and agendas will be targeted.
Back in Canada, Liberal Party leaders, including the lame
duck Justin Trudeau, have come up with tons of terrible ideas
that would regulate what you can say or do. As I reported for
The Free Press, they want to push the limits of censorship. One
proposal would fine you for saying good things about fossil
fuels, another proposal arresting people for hate crimes that
have yet to be committed.
The ongoing political turmoil in Canada is the only reason
these things have not yet happened. Understand this: There's
nothing stopping the next liberal government from moving
forward and making these proposals the law.
You may be thinking, well, that's a shame for the
Australians or Canadians or Brits, or whoever, but we're not
them. This is the United States, and we have a long, storied
tradition of protecting First Amendment rights. American courts
have ruled time and again on the side of the protestors, the
flag burners, the neo-Nazis--the assumption being that, if the
most offensive speech is protected, then all speech is
protected.
Until recently, as you're no doubt aware, it was the Left
in America that felt most passionate about defending those
rights. Historically, the people who stood up for unpopular
opinions were ACLU lawyers and academics. It was people on the
Right who were less enthusiastic about the full-throated
exchange of ideas.
Whatever the case, I'm a great admirer of Americans'
affinity for free expression and I cannot stress enough how
unique this conversation is, the one that we're having right
now. In no other country that I'm aware of do people argue with
such passion for our right to say, protest, or believe whatever
we want.
I am worried because we live in an illiberal moment. This
moment has been building for many years and there's many forces
behind it, social, political, and economic. For one thing, the
Left has lost its passion for the First Amendment.
Now, it's true that there are plenty of conservatives who
would prefer that school libraries not include books about
gender fluidity or critical race theory. There are others who
have gone so far as to ban authors like Toni Morrison or
Margaret Atwood.
All that is wrong. I am less concerned about this trend
than I am about the censorship that has happened under Joe
Biden, in partnership with Washington and much of corporate
America, including banks and social media companies. This
partnership affects far more people than a relatively small
number of school boards canceling Ibram Kendi's ``How to Be an
Antiracist.'' It's harder to detect.
When a school board removes a book from its shelves,
there's usually a meeting and a public airing of ideas, of
opinions. When Meta or the Bank of America decide that one of
their users or account holders has voiced the wrong opinion,
they can take action that the vast majority of us will never
know about. They can suppress an algorithm, remove a book from
the digital shelf and suspend a checking account. Which raises
a very frightening prospect: We do not even know that our
freedom is being taken away.
In case you think I'm overstating things, consider the
relatively recent phenomena of debanking, which I've reported
on for The Free Press, where big banks have quietly ended their
relationship with customers who have unpopular opinions. Banks
have targeted people on both side of the aisle, from President
Trump's most fervent supporters to Muslim Americans, among
others.
What's concerning isn't so much who has been wronged, but
the creeping illiberal tide that has swept America over the
last several years. The number of tech CEOs who attended
President Trump's Inauguration gives me hope. I'm told this
signals the dawn of a new era in America, a return to first
principles.
Many of you may have misgivings about so many billionaires
steering national policy, and for good reason, but if the
billionaires coming around to President Trump means they're
coming back to their Silicon Valley roots, and their belief in
an unfettered marketplace of ideas, if this means that the
shadow-bannings and mysterious manipulations on social media
will stop, if this means that we can speak more freely now,
then, well, that is a great thing. That is the most important
because, as you know, all freedom stems from this freedom.
I'll leave you with this thought: The city on a hill that
is America, with its abiding faith in people's right to speak
freely and think freely, is as important today as it has ever
been, maybe more.
At a time when we're told over and over that we're
suffering through ``late-stage capitalism,'' or that Western
liberal values are wrongheaded, I want to emphasize that
there's nothing wrongheaded about standing up for the liberties
that you, the Americans, have so valiantly defended for so
long, liberties that other peoples and governments are too
cowardly to stand up for.
In some places, this commitment to liberty ebbs and flows.
It has more to do with prevailing opinion or what's trending.
The great wisdom of America has been always to rise above this,
to ignore whatever was in or out of fashion, and to commit with
unwavering fervor to your first principles, principles that
must be defended now more than ever.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Subramanya follows:]
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Chair Jordan. Thank you. Mr. Shellenberger, you are
recognized. I let Ms. Subramanya go a little long, but I hope
you will stay a little closer to five. That was a make up for
Mr. Raskin's statement, I think. Go right ahead.
STATEMENT OF MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER
Mr. Shellenberger. Chair Jordan, Ranking Member Raskin, and
the Members of the Committee, thank you for inviting my
testimony.
Nearly two years ago, I testified and provided evidence to
a Subcommittee of this Committee about the existence of a
Censorship-Industrial Complex, a network of government agencies
including the Department of Homeland Security, government
contractors including the Stanford Internet Observatory, and
Big Tech social media platforms that conspire to censor
ordinary Americans and elected officials alike for holding
disfavored views.
Today, the Censorship Industrial Complex is on the
defensive. On January 20, 2025, just hours after his
inauguration, President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order
on Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.
One week earlier, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced we are
going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our
platform. Zuckerberg announced that he and Meta would follow
the lead of Elon Musk at X and create crowd sourced fact
checking in his ``Community Notes'' to replace much of the fact
checking the company had outsourced to others.
Thanks in large measure to work of this Committee, the
Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government last year, as
well as to the investigative reporting by those of us here
today, we were able to shine some light on some of the worst
actors in the Censorship Industrial Complex such as the
Stanford Internet Observatory, which I singled out in my
testimony two years ago. In June of last year, the observatory
shut down in response to our collective exposes.
Unfortunately, the Censorship Industrial Complex remains
almost entirely intact in Europe, Australia, Britain, Brazil,
and other Nations in the West continue to seek new forms of
censorship and information control including digital
identification tied to social media. My colleagues and I have
been over two years into our research characterizing the
Censorship Industrial Complex, and we continue to discover
whole new institutions involved in censorship.
The latest is the United States Agency for International
Development or USAID. Last October, we published a report that
noted that USAID had funded the creation of a Censorship
Industrial Complex in Brazil complete with third-party fact
checkers, committees of experts in charge of deciding for the
entire society what the truth is on any given issue. After I
published the ``Twitter Files--Brazil,'' last spring, the
Attorney General of Brazil opened a formal, criminal
investigation of me which is still ongoing.
In 2021, USAID even published a so-called ``Disinformation
Primer'' that called for advertiser outreach to disrupt the
funding of financial incentive to disinform. Such advertiser
outreach was precisely the advertiser boycott strategy used by
groups with ties to the U.S. intelligence community. Those
groups with uncritical support and amplification from the news
media were able to use the strategy to successfully to get
Facebook and Twitter to censor more content.
The European Commission appears intent on using its powers
granted to it through the Digital Services Act to demand that
X, Facebook, and other platforms censor speech. The Commission
last year threatened to fine X up to six percent of its annual
global revenue for failing to crack down on so-called false
information and not giving handing over its data to small
committees of experts, chosen by the Commission, to decide what
is true and false.
To be sure, the momentum is with us, the free speech
advocates. We have won a number of important battles over the
last two years. It is also clear that many governing and media
elites worldwide view expanding censorship of online platforms
as a must-have, not a nice-to-have feature of global
governance. The head of NATO, NATO-backed think tanks, the
European Commission, former President Barack Obama, former
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, the United
Nations, the World Health Organization, the World Economic
Forum, influential think tanks at Harvard and Stanford,
elements of the DOD, the CIA, the FBI, the National Science
Foundation, the Department of Homeland Security, and many
others have all called for government censorship of so-called
misinformation in recent years. It is not just censorship that
is the problem. The problem is that deep State agencies within
the U.S. Government have for two decades sought to gain control
over the production of news and other information around the
world, as part of ongoing covert and overt influence
operations, and that after 2016, multiple actors in several
deep-state U.S. Government agencies turned the tools of
counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and counterpopulism
against the American people.
I strongly urge Congress to defund the Censorship
Industrial Complex and seek a proper accounting of the various
efforts to fund it, including secretly through pass-through
organizations and shell organizations like the ones employed by
USAID to fund groups like OCCRP and hide U.S. Government
funding and control. I further urge Congress to seek other ways
to reduce the exposure of American social media users and
companies to the threat of censorship from Europe, Britain,
Brazil, and other Nations. We should respect national
sovereignty, but Vice President Vance makes a good point when
he asks why Americans should be spending our wealth and putting
our lives on the line for Western European NATO members who are
actively demanding censorship by American companies of our
speech. Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Shellenberger follows:]
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Chair Jordan. Thank you.
Mr. Taibbi, you are recognized for five minutes.
STATEMENT OF MATT TAIBBI
Mr. Taibbi. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Two years ago, when
Michael and I first testified before your Weaponization of
Government Subcommittee, Democratic Members called us so-called
journalists, suggested we were bought-off scribes, and
questioned our ethics and our loyalties. When we tried to
answer, we were told to shut up, take off our tin foil hats,
and remember two things: (1) There is no digital censorship.
(2) If there is digital censorship, it is for our own good.
I was shocked. I thought the whole thing had to be a
mistake. There was no way the party that I gave votes to my
whole life was now procensorship. Then last year, I listened to
John Kerry, whom I voted for, talk to the World Economic Forum.
Speaking about disinformation he said, ``Our First Amendment
stands as a major block to our ability to hammer it out of
existence.'' He complained that it is really hard to govern
because people self-select where they go for their news, which
makes it much harder to build consensus.
Now, I defended John Kerry when people said he looks
French, but Marie Antoinette would have been embarrassed by
this speech. He was essentially complaining that the peasants
are self-selecting their own sources of media. What is next?
Letting them make up their own minds?
Last, building consensus may be a politician's job, but it
is not mine as a citizen or as a journalist. In fact, making it
hard to govern is exactly the media's job. The failure to
understand this is why we have a censorship problem. This is an
Alamo moment for the First Amendment. Most of America's closest
allies, as both Rupa and Michael have pointed out, have already
adopted draconian speech laws. We are surrounded. The E.U.'s
new Digital Services Act is the most comprehensive censorship
law ever instituted in a Western democratic society.
Ranking Member Raskin, you don't have to go as far as
Russia or China to find people jailed for speech. Our allies in
England now have an Online Safety Act, which empowers the
government to jail people for nebulous offenses like false
communication or causing psychological harm. Germany, France,
Australia, Canada, and other Nations have implemented similar
ideas. These laws are totally incompatible with our system.
Some of our own citizens have been harassed or even arrested in
some of these countries, but our government has not stood up
for them. Why? Because many of our bureaucrats believe in these
laws.
Take USAID. Many Americans are now in an uproar because
they learned about over $400 million going to an organization
called Internews, whose Chief, Jeanne Bourgault, boasted to
Congress about training hundreds of thousands of people in
journalism, but her views are almost identical to Kerry's. She
gave a talk once about building trust and combating
misinformation in India during the Pandemic. She said that
after months of a really beautiful unified COVID-19 message
vaccine enthusiasm rose to 87 percent. When mixed information
on vaccine efficacy got out, hesitancy ensued. We are paying
this person to train journalists, and she doesn't know the
press does not exist to promote unity or political goals like
vaccine enthusiasm. That is propaganda, not journalism.
Bourgault also once said that,
To fight bad content, we need to work really hard on exclusion
lists or inclusion lists and really need to focus our ad
dollars toward the good news.
That is what she called it.
Again, if you don't know the fastest way to a road trust in
media is by having government sponsor exclusion lists, you
shouldn't be getting a dollar in taxpayer money, let along $476
million of it. The USAID is just a tiny piece of the censorship
machine that Michael and I saw across that long list of
agencies. Collectively, they have bought up every part of the
news production line: Sources, think tanks, research, fact
checking, antidisinformation, commercial media scoring, and
when all else fails, straight up censorship. It is a giant
closed messaging loop whose purpose is to transform the free
press into exactly that consensus machine. There is no way to
remove this route surgically. The whole mechanism has to go.
Is there Right-wing misinformation? Hell yes. It exists in
every direction, but I grew up a Democrat and don't remember
being afraid of it. At the time, we figured we didn't need
censorship because we thought we had the better argument.
Obviously, many of you lack the same confidence. You took
billions of dollars from taxpayers, and you blew it on programs
whose entire purpose was to tell them they are wrong about
things they can see with their own eyes. You sold us out. Until
these rather tiresome questions are answered, this problem is
not fixed. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Taibbi follows:]
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Chair Jordan. Thank you, Mr. Taibbi.
Mr. Aaron, you are recognized for five minutes.
STATEMENT OF CRAIG AARON
Mr. Aaron. Good morning and thank you for inviting me to
testify today. To my understanding, this hearing is motivated
by concerns over free speech, censorship, government
interference with private companies, and the influence of
billionaires who control our media system. I share these
concerns. I worry about government censorship which is what the
First Amendment protects us against. I worry about collusion
between government officials and powerful tech executives. I
worry about algorithmic discrimination used to push partisan
agendas or spread hate. I worry about independent journalists
and whistleblowers being attacked, harassed, doxxed, or muzzled
for asking hard questions or simply reporting facts. We should
all be worried right now because we are facing a true free
speech emergency.
Elon Musk, the owner of X and one of the richest men in the
world, is now embedded inside the Federal Government,
unelected, and apparently unaccountable to anyone. He is a
special government employee with all the privileges of a high-
ranking official, but no regard for transparency or the laws of
this Congress. Musk also has shocking conflicts of interest and
a giant social media megaphone that he uses to threaten and
retaliate against his critics. With his power to distort
narratives and spread falsehoods, he is fueling a
Constitutional crisis.
Inside the government, Musk is attempting to tear down
vital institutions, sabotage essential programs, carry out
personal vendettas, and terrify civil servants. He sent a gang
of hackers to breach core government systems, giving him
unfettered and unprecedented access to our most sensitive
information. Yet, the Members of this Committee tasked with
oversight, have been blocked from even entering Federal
Government buildings to investigate. Journalists trying to tell
the public about the so-called Department of Government
Efficiency are being harassed at Musk's instigation or
threatened with prosecution by the U.S. Attorney. These
government employees are actively trying to suppress speech
about government activities. This is a free speech emergency,
and it is not the only one.
Brendan Carr, the Chair of the FCC, wants to revoke
broadcast licenses because he doesn't like the viewpoints he
sees on TV. That is censorship. The FCC has also threatened
news organizations over editorial decisionmaking, reporting on
law enforcement, and basic fact checking. The FCC is now
threatening to block a merger sought by CBS at the same time
that President Trump is suing the company for $20 billion
because he didn't like how 60 Minutes edited an interview with
the former Vice President. Big media and tech companies,
Disney, ABC, Meta, maybe now CBS, are paying tens of millions
of dollars to settle specious lawsuits. They appear to be
paying off the President to shield themselves from reprisal or
to gain regulatory favors.
Social media companies too are making drastic changes to
content in response to the new administration. Meta, for
example, went from promising to step away from politics, to
actively pushing the President's agenda after Mr. Trump
threatened Mark Zuckerberg with life in prison. If you were
concerned about low-level officials sending emails to social
media staffers five years ago, then you should actually be
worried when all the billionaire owners of these companies line
up on the dais of the President's inauguration, clutching
million dollar checks to show their loyalty.
The Trump Administration is using the power of the
government to shake down the media and quash dissent. This
country was founded on the premise that our public sphere and
our free press should be protected against government
manipulation or retribution, including from the President or
from special government employees.
I am a former journalist. I am sitting here on a panel with
journalists, and I may not agree with them, but I will defend
their right to speak and write without fear of intimidation and
harassment by government officials. Without fear of unlawful
government surveillance for simply speaking to their sources,
without fear of unconstitutional retaliation. I hope we can
agree on that. I hope we can set aside our differences and
speak out against true government censorship no matter who is
in power. Free speech is not reserved for certain viewpoints.
Free speech isn't meant to just protect the rich and powerful.
Free speech isn't just for billionaires. The First Amendment
protects everyone's freedom and free expression, and we must
defend it. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Aaron follows:]
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Chair Jordan. Thank you, Mr. Aaron. We will now move to
five-minute questions, under the five-minute rule I should say,
and the gentleman from California, Mr. Issa, is recognized.
Mr. Issa. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Taibbi, Mr. Aaron went
on for five minutes and the feel and the fact was he said
multiple times that if you are a billionaire, you are not
qualified to do what has made you a billionaire. If you are a
billionaire, you are corrupt. Now, he was particularly
assaulting Elon Musk.
Let me just go through a couple of quick questions. First,
Elon Musk, would you say that he is best known as rich or
successful?
Mr. Taibbi. Probably both. Depends on who you ask.
Mr. Issa. Did he, in fact, reinvent launch, so that we went
from the inefficiency where we were paying the Russians to
basically put our people in space to today, 92 plus percent of
all launches in the world are SpaceX and they are done for a
fraction of the cost?
Mr. Taibbi. Yes, that is my understanding.
Mr. Issa. OK, so you are a journalist, not an employer, per
se, but if you were going to employ somebody to take costs out
of something, would you find someone that reinvented financial
transactions, and then went on to reinvent space launch, and
then went on to reinvent the automobile, and did all those
successfully before he was my age?
OK, now as a journalist, you do look at who in government
does what and you have done it globally, but particularly you
are an expert in the U.S. How many elected officials look at
tax returns or government documents directly? I mean how many
elected officials do that for the United States Government?
Mr. Taibbi. I don't know. I would like to know.
Mr. Issa. Officially, the number is zero.
Mr. Taibbi. Oh, is it?
Mr. Issa. It is 100 percent done by career bureaucrats. In
fact, nobody elected does the basic work of searching data
bases and doing that. It just isn't part of the system. The
reality is that almost all the dives are either done by career
people or people like Deloitte or PricewaterhouseCoopers. The
fact is looking for government inefficiency, we have spent
billions of dollars inefficiently looking for government
inefficiency for decades. Isn't that true?
Mr. Taibbi. Yes, I did a story on the failed audit of the
DoD that concluded yes, we had spent a ton of money on those
audits and no effect.
Mr. Issa. Right. So, we paid outside auditors, including
some of the world's best and they have basically thrown in the
towel as far as actually making a permanent change. So, when
the President has a group of individuals go in with career
people in the room, and look for it and they find it, is that a
reason to go nah-nah-nah, he is a billionaire, rather than nah-
nah, this is a disrupter of industries. It is proven that he
can take massive amounts of costs out of doing things and as a
result, the United States of America would benefit by its money
going further?
Mr. Taibbi. Representative Issa, some of these falls
outside of my area of expertise.
Mr. Issa. It falls outside Aaron's, too, that is why I am
bringing the point to you. Let me go to something that is in
your expertise. As a journalist, if you took the many words and
phonemes of a half hour or hour interview and cut and pasted
them to create a completely different set of answers to
questions, what would you be doing?
Mr. Taibbi. Yes, typically, that is a kind of deceptive
editing. I think that was the issue in the 60 Minutes case.
Mr. Issa. Wouldn't you call it outright fraud if a person
says X and you print Y? Wouldn't you be sued for it if you
maliciously and deliberately changed the outcome to affect an
election potentially on behalf of a candidate?
Mr. Taibbi. It kind of depends on the situation, but I
think most organizations would be embarrassed to be caught
doing that kind of thing.
Mr. Issa. Wasn't 60 Minutes and CBS embarrassed when they
got caught?
Mr. Taibbi. Well, they settled in the case apparently, so I
think that speaks to that.
Mr. Issa. So, in other words, they were embarrassed.
Mr. Taibbi. It would seem that way from the outside.
Mr. Issa. Well, I am glad you are here today, and I just
want to note for the record and ask that it be placed in the
record. Last week, we put another piece of legislation in with
Reps Salazar, Baumgartner, and Gill, that in fact, specifically
provides for foreign government officials who engage in
censorship of American speech to be inadmissible or deported
and I look forward to that going through the Committee on a
bipartisan basis. I yield back.
Chair Jordan. The gentleman yields back. The Chair will
recognize the gentleman from New York, Mr. Nadler.
Mr. Nadler. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, President
Trump has launched an all-out assault on the press. Don't take
my word for it. Here is the President himself.
[Video played.]
The President says we have to straighten out the press.
That should be chilling to anyone who believes in the First
Amendment. The Trump Administration is already targeting media
outlets who refuse to praise the President. Yesterday, the
White House barred the Associated Press from the Oval Office
because the news organization simply declined to change its
style guide to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
Trump himself has made it abundantly clear that he thinks any
journalist who dares to criticize him is an enemy of the
people. He has even threatened to revoke the broadcast
licenses, we just saw that, of news organizations that
criticize his administration.
This assault on free speech is being orchestrated by
Trump's pick for FCC chair, Brendan Carr, a Right-wing coauthor
of Project 2025. Carr is using his position to punish the news
outlets that diverge from the White House's approved narrative,
acting in violation of the Constitution, Federal law, and the
FCC's own mission, Chair Carr has decided to use the agency to
harass and intimidate news organizations to strengthen the
White House's talking points. One of Carr's first actions was
to revive three complaints made to the FCC by a conservative
group, The Center for American Rights against ABC, CBS, and NBC
for their critical coverage of President Trump. For the record,
there was a complaint that Carr didn't revive. Of course, it
was a claim made against Fox News, a news organization that
agreed to pay an $800 million settlement to a private company,
Dominion Voting Systems, and admitted to promoting false claims
of fraud during the 2020 election related to the company's
voting machines.
Mr. Aaron, what message is Brendan Carr and the
administration sending by investigating ABC, CBS, and NBC, but
not Fox News?
Mr. Aaron. Thank you, Congressman, for the question. I
think this is a blatant abuse of power from Commissioner Carr.
He is saying we are coming for you at the same time the
President is literally negotiating a multibillion lawsuit
settlement, and he has pulled out all the stops. He said, ``I
might not approve your merger.'' He said, ``I want to see the
transcripts.'' He has come back again and again and again. I
just imagine when a Democratic FCC Chair thought about like
hey, could we do an independent local study, everyone was up in
arms. Here we have the Chair of the FCC saying I am going to
use the power of my office to squeeze these news organizations
either to settle or change or transform their coverage simply
because the President and Mr. Carr don't like it. That is
textbook government censorship.
Mr. Nadler. Thank you, Mr. Aaron. The former Chair of the
FCC, Mr. Carr's predecessor, Jessica Rosenworcel, said these
complaints seek to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC
in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First
Amendment. To do so would set a dangerous precedent. She also
warned that the agency should not be the President's speech
police.
When Mr. Carr was before the Oversight Committee last
Congress, he was asked a very simple question. If the President
directed the FCC to revoke ABC or NBC's broadcast license
because he felt they were being unfair to him, would you
comply? The answer should have been a simple resounding no.
Yet, Mr. Carr repeatedly refused to answer.
Mr. Aaron, what do you see as some of the most dangerous
actions this administration is currently taking to attack the
freedom of the press and to silence critics of this
administration?
Mr. Aaron. Well, Mr. Nadler, I appreciate you lifting up
the FCC because this is an agency that people don't necessarily
know a lot about, but has an incredible amount of power over
the public airways, over the wires that bring us our cable
television, and so far, in his short time in office, Chair Carr
has used that position to go after journalists, to file these
very threatening letters questioning how individual reporters
are covering stories of national importance to really abuse
this power in ways that we have never seen before. The FCC
usually talks about licenses on very narrow terms. If an owner
has committed major crimes, maybe there will be an
investigation into their license.
The idea that a news organization could be threatened
because they asked a tough question of the President, because
they tried to facts check him during a debate, because they
edited their own news content before putting it out over the
airwaves is preposterous and it is dangerous. It does really
warrant the attention of this Committee because it is quickly
getting out of hand. He is expanding this. He has started to go
after cable companies to investigate their internal corporate
practices. This is all happening and it only seems to be
speeding up.
Mr. Nadler. Thank you. Mr. Chair, I yield back.
Chair Jordan. The gentleman yields back. Mr. Shellenberger,
is the press afraid to attack President Trump?
Mr. Shellenberger. No.
Chair Jordan. I mean he can look at the front page of
Politico. Every headline is an attack on President Trump. That
is what the Ranking Member of the Subcommittee just said, are
you afraid? It is a ridiculous argument. I recognize the
gentleman from Arizona.
Mr. Biggs. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Two days ago, Senator
Chuck Schumer created an online portal for Federal employees to
disclose wrongdoing and abuses of power. In a way I am kind of
glad he did this because I have been here for a while and there
is a plethora of abuses of power I have seen, particularly in
the area of censorship.
So, at the top of my complaint list would probably be Joe
Biden and his staff because they continually pressured large
social media platforms to change their content moderation
policies to have a built-in bias system against any speech
which even had a hint of criticism against the Biden
Administration.
We do know one thing. Censorship can occur through an
agent, through a direct link to government contact even though
it is a private entity that is censoring. We know that from the
case law that has come out. Here we have Facebook admitted that
it started censoring posts about COVID originating from a
Chinese lab and content critical of the vaccine after tense
conversations with the Biden-Harris Administration in which
they were told to do more to combat speech which has since been
verified as true.
Facebook officials describe one White House advisor as
outraged that Facebook didn't remove a meme. It was a joke
about COVID-19. The White House advisor was Andy Slavitt. He
would go on my list of people that you complain against.
President Biden himself said that Facebook was killing
people for not taking down this type of content which caused
Facebook to change its policies further. Facebook employees
would later say that this decision stemmed from the continued
criticism of our approach from the Biden Administration. Mark
Zuckerberg even told Joe Rogan that people from the Biden
Administration would call us our team and scream at them and
curse to take down things that were true. The White House
employed the same kind of pressure campaign with YouTube,
Amazon, and other platforms. We can also include Anthony Fauci
in this list since he perpetuated falsehoods about everything
from the vaccine, social distancing, masks, and more. He
demanded that these social media companies clamp down on
anyone, including qualified scientists who dared say anything
that was contradictory of him.
The new CISA, headed by Jen Easterly, went out of her way
to report posts on platforms which they thought were too much
against the administration's narrative. There is the FBI who
ordered platforms to censor the New York Post's story about
Hunter Biden's laptop despite knowing that the story was true
because they had possession of the laptop. We could go on and
on.
I want to--this notion here is that after this Committee's
oversight and we did some good oversight, President Trump's
resounding victory, the entities that I have just mentioned,
CISA the FBI, and the DHS' cybersecurity have all stopped their
direct censorship activities.
What do you think, Ms. Subramanya, how do we know that this
is true? How do we know that they have stopped their censorship
activities?
Ms. Subramanya. Sorry. Who has stopped their censorship
activities?
Mr. Biggs. Well, allegedly the FBI, CISA, and the DHS'
Cybersecurity Bureau.
Ms. Subramanya. Well, we don't know. We don't know anything
for sure, and I think this administration is only getting
started by investigating these agencies. I think my own
personal view on this is that it's essentially baked into the
system right now and it's going to be very hard to get rid of
these tools of censorship. Oftentimes, they're--there's shape-
shifting, if you want to use that term--they're recast into
different tools, but essentially it's the same tools of
censorship that go after individuals.
As I reported on de-banking, I'm very, very happy that this
administration is finally paying attention to this very
important issue of ordinary Americans being censored, being
cutoff the financial grid for having unpopular opinions. I
believe there was a Senate Banking Committee hearing last week
that I heard from witnesses on the issue of de-banking, which I
reported on. That's pretty scary.
I'm very, very happy that this attention is finally
getting--this issue is finally getting the attention it
deserves. Hopefully, average Americans will not get de-banked
in the future, but we don't know anything for sure. It's still
too early.
Mr. Biggs. Thank you. I want to just comment on--Mr. Aaron
has said--in his written statement he is defining censorship as
requiring government action and yet--to get First Amendment
protection. Yet, the Murthy v. Missouri case, which said that
the plaintiffs did not get protection because they could not
directly link the actions of government officials to their
instances of censorship.
That is very different than the Vullo case, NRA v. Vullo,
where the courts in an unanimous opinion said because they
could show a direct link. That is the critical issue here. We
know that the Biden Administration; we could show that direct
link, that they were causing censorship, they were--and this is
the Vullo case--relying on the 1963 case, they were using
coercive tactics to get censorship. That is the distinction,
Mr. Aaron.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Chair Jordan. The gentleman yields back.
The gentleman recognizes the Ranking Member.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Aaron, in November your co-witness Mr. Taibbi went on
Chris Cuomo's show and said one of his great concerns was,
quote,
There's going to be an enormous temptation within the Trump
Government to do things like going after media organizations
they don't like. And they can't do that. If they end up doing
that, it's going to be a disaster.
Has the disaster arrived?
Mr. Aaron. I believe we're witnessing it right now. It's
underway and speeding up.
Mr. Raskin. What is the evidence of that?
Mr. Aaron. Well, we talked already about the problems at
the FCC. I think what we're seeing is incredibly powerful
government officials using their power and their pulpit to go
directly after news organizations. President Trump called for
60 Minutes to be, quote, ``terminated.'' Mr. Musk has gone
after individual reporters who are trying to cover what DOGE is
doing.
We don't know what DOGE is doing. There's very little
public information available and yet reporters who dare to
actually ask who are these people, what are they doing, why do
they have access to our most important personal information--
when that happens, here comes Mr. Musk, a government employee,
but also the head of a social media company, coming after
individual reporters. Those are some of the things that I am
incredibly concerned about, and there are many others who are
saying they're going to come after journalists including the
nominee of the head of the FBI.
Mr. Raskin. All four witnesses have spoken about the
dangers of State censorship, but also the dangers of big tech
censorship. With Elon Musk now appointed a special government
employee, although he has not filled out his ethics forms or
gotten a conflict-of-interest waiver--I hope, Mr. Chair, we
will get a chance to work on that. Do we believe now that the
dangers of State censorship have merged with the dangers of big
tech censorship?
Mr. Aaron. I'm obviously very concerned because it's one
thing for the government to express its viewpoints and say we
wish you would do this or we wish you would do that. It's quite
another for this kind of merger and full-on collusion
happening. We were worried about the government--this Committee
was very worried about the government in the previous
administration putting pressure on Twitter. Now, we have the
head of X working inside the government to actually take apart
government computer systems. That would seem to rise to a
higher level of concern.
Mr. Raskin. Right. Before people were worried because some
nameless, faceless bureaucrats would write a memo saying there
is election disinformation; it needs to be corrected. They
thought that this was a First Amendment violation, although the
courts ended up rejecting that. In any event, they didn't like
the government even warning of factual disinformation being
warned of online. Now, what we have got is the head of X, the
owner of X, who controls all of that speech, being part of the
government itself. Yet, a lot of people aren't uttering a peep
about that. Why is it?
Mr. Aaron. Well, I have to ask in some cases where are they
getting their news? Are they hearing about it? I have questions
about that. I think people are outraged. I see people every day
here in Washington with signs saying, ``Why is Elon Musk's
hands on my data?'' I talked to my cab driver--
Mr. Raskin. I know there are millions of people in America
outraged. I am talking about my colleagues who couldn't stop
talking about a handful of memos that were written to the
social media about factual disinformation. They were upset
about that. Now, we have got an absolute merger of the social
media State with the traditional governmental apparatus.
Look, I am not sure I understand what my colleagues'
position is on whether there should be free speech on social
media sites or not. For several years they campaigned to get
sites like X and Facebook to remove fact checking on their
sites. It sounded like what they were saying is we want a
radical open free market in speech, no censorship for anything:
Racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, fraudulent speech, whatever, not
because they endorsed that speech, but because what they were
saying was we just want a radically open free market.
Then Elon Musk takes over X. He kicks off journalists who
are critical of him or Donald Trump, he kicks of Texas Observer
journalist Steven Monacelli, Ken Klippenstein of the Intercept,
podcaster Rob Russo, progressive political groups he doesn't
like. So, now X is flooded with all the racist, anti-Semitic
filth, the misogyny, all kinds of studies about how it is
dramatically through the roof. Yet, he is getting rid of
political speech he disagrees with and my colleagues have
nothing to say about that. Is that the Right approach to free
speech if you think free speech is at stake on the social
media?
Mr. Aaron. Absolutely not, Congressman. I mean, as we
talked about repeatedly in this hearing, we need free speech
for everyone. We need to protect free expression. So, if Elon
Musk is doing something, this Committee is concerned about, if
Elon Musk and Donald Trump are colluding to pressure media
companies, they should be just as concerned; I would argue more
concerned given the evidence than they have been in the many
hearings covered here about low-level employees--low-level
staffers.
Mr. Raskin. Right. Mr. Taibbi tweeted to Elon Musk. He
said,
Elon, I've repeatedly declined to criticize you, and I have
nothing to do with your beef with Substack. Is there a reason
why I'm being put in the middle of things?
He said, ``Am I being shadow banned?'' His answer from Elon
Musk was, ``You are dead to me. Please get off Twitter and just
stay on Substack.''
I yield back to you, Mr. Chair.
Chair Jordan. The gentleman yields back.
The gentleman from California is recognized.
Mr. McClintock. Thank you, Mr. Chair. The Democrats
complain that Mr. Musk is an unelected bureaucrat. Well, I
remind them that every bureaucrat is unelected. That is why the
elected President is solely vested with the Executive powers of
the Federal Government. There is no bureaucrat that is
independent of the President. That would mean that they are
independent of the people, which is the very definition of a
tyranny.
Mr. Musk is accountable to the President who in turn is
then accountable to the people. The threat that we face is
unelected bureaucrats who are working contrary to the will of
the people as expressed through the Presidential election.
It seems to me that the beating heart of a democracy is our
freedom of speech. That is how a free society sorts truth from
lies, and right from wrong, and wisdom from folly. Americans
have always believed that the way to do that is put the two of
them side by side and trust the American people to tell the
difference. They have done a good job of that in 250 years.
It is clear to me that in the last four years the Democrats
attempted to install themselves rather than the American people
as the arbiters of what is true and right and wise. What we saw
was the power of government focused on muzzling their
opposition and preventing the democracy from working.
I'm particularly concerned about the coordinated
suppression of the story of the Hunter Biden laptop because a
post-election polling in which respondents said that they--if
they had seen that information during the election, it would
have changed their vote, and in numbers that would have changed
the outcome of the Presidential election. That is election
interference on a historic scale and about a clear threat to
democracy as it gets.
I remember a story of a retiring law professor who said
that for many years he would begin his course on the First
Amendment by telling the joke of an American and a Soviet
talking about freedom of speech in their countries. The
American said, ``Well, we have the right to say whatever we
want about our government officials.'' The Soviet replied,
``Well, so do we except the officials don't let us lie about
them.'' He said that always got a big laugh in his classrooms
until the last few years. That is what I find very shocking
about what has occurred in our society.
Now, I agree with the Democrats that we need to be just as
vigilant in defending speech we disagree with that is
essentially true, something that they were unwilling to do
themselves during the last four years that they held power.
Now, Mr. Taibbi, you have talked about this before. I have
often said we must never allow the Left to become our teachers,
but you saw this transition firsthand, and you have spoken out
about the importance of freedom of speech on all sides. Would
you care to elaborate?
Mr. Taibbi. I'm sorry. I'm a little--thank you for the
question, Mr. Congressman. This sudden adopting of the free
speech religion is a little jarring. Obviously, you're very
concerned about things that Elon Musk may be doing, or Donald
Trump may be doing, but where was that concern when White House
officials were pressuring Twitter to remove The New York Times
reporter Alex Berenson, who was ultimately taken down for
saying an absolutely true statement, which was that the vaccine
does not prevent infection or transmission? That case is still
going through the courts. Where was that concern when the New
York Post was locked out of its own account for two weeks for
an absolutely true story about Hunter Biden's laptop?
Mr. McClintock. Two of the most consequential issues that
affect the lives of every American are the debates over climate
change and the debate over COVID and how to respond to it, and
yet the government worked overtime to suppress contrary
opinions.
Mr. Shellenberger, you mentioned that one thing we need to
do is defund the institutions that are suppressing speech, and
I couldn't agree more. Let me ask you, what else should we be
doing right now? What legislation should we be pursuing to
enshrine the First Amendment freedoms that the Left waged war
against these years?
Mr. Shellenberger. Well, thank you for asking, Congressman.
It's really--we don't have accountability yet. We don't have
the files. We don't even--we don't know what really happened.
We have some of the files of what's occurred, but just on the
Hunter Biden laptop case you had a sophisticated influence
operation being operated by the FBI through the Aspen Institute
to pre-bunk, which is code for brainwash, journalists and the
social media censors in advance of the story coming out. That
is next-level manipulation going on by--illegal by the FBI. We
don't have any of the files on that.
The most pressing threat right now is from Europe. The
censorship industrial complex is sort of retreating into
Europe. They want to weaponize their Digital Services Act. As a
taxpayer, as an American that's--whose life and my family's
life is on the line to protect Europe, I don't know what I'm
doing if I'm trying to defend a continent that wants to
suppress freedom of speech for their own people and for the
entire planet.
Mr. McClintock. Well, my time is expired, but I would be
very interested in the thoughts of our panelists on what
additional actions the government can take. You are saying
defund them and get to the bottom of it. I couldn't agree more.
Then what? Thank you.
Chair Jordan. The gentleman yields back.
The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Tennessee.
Mr. Cohen. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Appreciate all the witnesses, the outstanding testimony.
The lady from Canada, I want to welcome you. You are our first
witness from the 51st State.
This hearing is interesting because, breaking news, Joe
Biden lost the election. Not going to run ever again. This
Committee's hearing--and I mean some good can come out of
looking about what happened, and some of the things weren't
proper, but Joe Biden is gone. We need to be looking at what is
happening right now, and what is happening right now is we have
a Constitutional crisis.
This is the Judiciary Committee where the Constitution
should not be something we think of as something we study in
school, but something we defend and protect against all
enemies, foreign and domestic. Right now it is being attacked.
The rule of law is--Ms. Subramanya, I think they quoted you
and said something about special--something about our core,
what is at stake is our core values. What is at stake is our
core values, the rule of law. This Committee is doing nothing
about it. We should be concerned about the rule of law,
concerned about the Constitution, concerned about the truth. We
are not doing that. We have a great problem.
The American people thought that they were going to elect a
government that get involved with inflation, reduce the price
of eggs, make their daily lives better, end the war in Ukraine
on day one. None of that has happened. Instead, we have gone
off on all this stuff. We have got a guy we call a ``Special
Government Employee," which sounds too much like a special
military operation. That is kind of a scary term, but that is
what we have got.
They talk about waste, fraud, and abuse. They say it all
the time, but they don't show us the waste, fraud, and abuse.
They just say they have discovered it, and they are finding it
and whatever, all this--it is just there are policy
differences, particularly with USAID, not necessarily waste,
fraud, and abuse.
Mr. Taibbi, I think you said that they can't do it
surgically. If Mr. Musk is such a genius, and he is a damn
smart boy. X is a smart boy, too. They were the two smart ones
in the room the other day. You do it surgically. You don't do
it with a sledgehammer. He is doing it with a sledgehammer, and
a gorilla can do it with a sledgehammer. A genius has to be
surgical.
You can say USAID's programs that are humanitarian purposes
and medical purposes, and providing food, working against
hunger, and all kind of problems we see in Africa with HIV/AIDS
and PEPFAR--you can keep those programs, which is the abundance
and majority of USAID. Instead, we are threatening them.
Elon Musk took over Twitter, and I can tell you, I have
been a Twitter user. I got more anti-Semitic comments on
Twitter since he took over by far. I had some before he took
over, but just a small amount. Now, almost every time I post
anything on Twitter I am going to get something about Jew, go
back to Israel, we don't need your type, Cohen, oh, yes, Cohen.
I am sick of that. Musk allows it. Go to BlueSky.
He has ruined Twitter. He went through that with the same
tactics he is going through the U.S. Government. The fork in
the road. Getting rid of people and firing so many people.
Twitter has been ruined. It was a marketplace for ideas. It no
longer is. It is a mouthpiece for the extreme Right and for
Musk.
Musk has not shown him to be able to understand the
government and speak the truth. When we had the continuing
resolution up last December Musk said, ``the bill allocated $3
billion to build a new football stadium in Washington.'' It
didn't allocate any money for a football stadium. He said it
emphatically, ``$3 billion.'' He said, ``There was going to be
a 40-percent salary increase for Congresspeople.'' No. It said
there would be a cost-of-living adjustment of three percent.
On USAID, he reposted as to Donald, Jr., a post that was
eventually found out to come out from a Russian operative, that
said that, ``Ukraine paid $20 million for celebrities like
Angelina Jolie, Sean Penn, Ben Stiller to come to Ukraine.''
False. They didn't pay anything for them.
They said that we spent--Musk said, ``$50 million,'' Trump
``$100 million, on condoms in Gaza for Hamas.'' That is not
truth. There was seven million, as all USAID spends all over,
and that is for helping on HIV/AIDS. The Gaza they spent some
money on was Gaza in Mozambique. They can get on a map and see
the Gulf of America, but they can't find out what is going on
in Africa. That is going to be the largest growing continent in
the world.
I am just concerned about the truth. I am concerned about
Musk. I am concerned about DOGE. I am concerned about this
employee who they wanted to bring back, and I think they did,
who said,
Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool. You could
not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity. We want to
normalize Indian hate. And that is not Tonto, that is an entire
country. And I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were
both wiped off the face of the earth.
That is a real nice character. That is who they took up as
their champion.
Thank you, sir. I yield back the balance of my time.
Chair Jordan. The gentleman yields.
The gentleman from Wisconsin is recognized.
Mr. Tiffany. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
At the end of your testimony, Mr. Taibbi, it says, ``No
wonder your approval ratings are lower than psoriasis.'' By the
way I have had a few bouts of it. It is nasty stuff. You said,
``You sold us out.'' Explain what you were saying at the end of
your testimony.
Mr. Taibbi. Many of the programs--thank you for the
question, Mr. Congressman. Many of the programs that Michael
and I reported on in the Twitter files, these are taxpayer-
funded programs that are being spent to remove the speech of
the taxpayers themselves, or to encourage platforms that take
down content of the taxpayers. Most people would disagree with
that allocation of resources.
I am hearing a lot about Elon Musk. Does that mean that I
should be in favor of the Department of Homeland Security
partnering with Stanford University to do a mass flagging
program ahead of the 2020 election where the speech of ordinary
citizens was taken down? These are two are completely separate
issues, but it's an institutional problem.
We have created all these institutions: The Global
Engagement Center is one, Counter Misinformation Program, the
FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force, and the Cybersecurity
Infrastructure Security Agency. These are all big institutions
that are part of the government that are directed toward this
exact activity and it has to be shut down for us to get back to
an absolutely free press environment.
Mr. Tiffany. On March 9, 2023, I believe you were in this
building testifying and the IRS knocked on your door. Give us a
retrospective, if you could do it kind of briefly; we got other
questions here. Give me a retrospective as you look back on
that incident two years ago.
Mr. Taibbi. Yes, I came back from testifying before this
Committee. On the train my wife told me that the IRS had left a
note on my door. They had knocked while I was testifying. This
again is why I'm finding it funny that people are suddenly
concerned about the harassment of journalists. I don't remember
any of you saying anything when this happened at the time.
Mr. Tiffany. You think it is a coincidence?
Mr. Taibbi. We subsequently learned thanks to Chair Jordan
who reached out to the Treasury that this case was opened on me
on December 24, 2022, when probably the most consequential
Twitter files report that I dropped was published. It was a
Saturday, and it was Christmas Eve. I don't think the IRS is
usually working that day.
Mr. Tiffany. Ms. Subramanya, in regard to Section 230 of
the Communications Decency Act might it be useful if the
liability shield that is currently in place be conditioned on
companies to make sure that they adhere to a free speech
standard? You think there maybe should be changes made to
Section 230 to make sure that free speech is protected?
Ms. Subramanya. I'm not familiar with this legislation.
What is the liability shield?
Mr. Tiffany. Mr. Shellenberger, would you like to take that
question?
Mr. Shellenberger. Sure. I've testified in front of the
Senate and written a White Paper on this issue. I think that
Section 230 should be reformed. If you're going to offer the
sweeping liability protection, then I think that adult users of
social media platforms should be able to choose and filter
their own legal content. I've said that publicly quite a bit
before. I haven't found a lot of interest in either party for
that proposal, but I do think that's the best way. Certainly,
you can still have a feed that the social media platforms
choose to feed you, but I do think there should be that option
for people to choose their own content.
Mr. Tiffany. You say in your testimony psy-op tactics being
used by the U.S. and U.K. military against the American people.
That is really scary stuff reading that. Could you elaborate,
because I think the American people need to hear--they need to
hear about this.
Mr. Shellenberger. Yes, we now know what happened, which is
that basically after the War on Terror the United States used
counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, counter-populism tactics
first in the Middle East as part the Arab Spring uprisings,
then in the Eastern Europe as part of the Colour Revolutions,
using social media to foment revolutions against places that we
wanted a regime change, and then using censorship in places to
repress conflicting opinion, in places that we were trying to
stabilize. Those tactics were then turned against the American
people after the Populist Revolutions of 2016.
First, you saw Russiagate, the wild conspiracy theory that
President Trump was somehow controlled through a sex blackmail
operation by the Russians. Then we also saw a very elaborate
effort to do exactly what they had done abroad creating small
committees of experts to decide what the truth was and demand
censorship on the basis of it.
I also mentioned there's also these proactive influence
operations, the most dramatic of which is the Hunter Biden
laptop, severely illegal. We also saw the mobilization of the
intelligence community. Now, in the latest article that we
published today we have documented that the Agency for
International Development has overseen basically a takeover of
the last decade-and-a-half of independent investigative
journalism in Europe and around the world through OCCRP and
supposedly independent journalism organizations with an eye to
basically controlling the information and controlling the major
news media that do investigative journalism.
Mr. Tiffany. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, thank you so
much for the work that you have done over the last couple
Congresses on this issue.
Chair Jordan. I appreciate it. The gentleman yields back.
I think the gentlelady from California is recognized.
Ms. Lofgren. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Donald Trump is a litigious individual. He is quick to sue
news organizations that try and hold him to account. He is also
the Commander in Chief who appears to be using every weapon in
the Federal Government's arsenal to go after those same news
organizations. He is currently suing in his private capacity
CBS for $20 billion, but at the same time his FCC Chair Brendan
Carr is investigating CBS while Mr. Trump, President Trump is
calling on him to go ever further and to revoke CBS's license
because he didn't like the coverage that they gave. He is doing
all this while Paramount, CBS's parent company, is in merger
talks with billionaire Trump super donor David Ellison.
So, Mr. Aaron, can you help us understand how these actions
by President Trump and his administration might send a chilling
message to news organizations?
Mr. Aaron. Yes. The message the administration is sending
is pay up and get in line. They've repeatedly--President Trump
as a private citizen filed these lawsuits, but President Trump
is no longer a private citizen. He's sitting in the Oval Office
using the power of that office and of his appointees to go
after the same companies he's filed lawsuits against. That's
outrageous. On terms that are almost unthinkable.
We're talking about editing a video. We're talking about
asking some fact checking questions. We're talking about
unbelievably normal operations of news organizations reporting
on the activity of law enforcement. All First Amendment
protected things that these news organizations are doing.
Yet, under the Trump Administration the message is if
you're not in line, if you're not singing from the our hymnal,
we're going to come after you with the force of the government.
That's what we should be concerned about. That's where it
crosses over from the concerns of an individual saying I didn't
like what you did to actual censorship and government power
being abused.
Ms. Lofgren. Well, it is not just what you have said in
December. ABC agreed to settle a $16 million lawsuit by Mr.
Trump and his foundations, and then just last month paid $25
million to settle what honestly as a lawyer seemed to me a
pretty ridiculous four-year-old lawsuit. Just last July, Mr.
Trump threatened to throw Mark Zuckerberg in jail. Then, after
he won Zuckerberg went down to Mar-a-Lago, had dinner with him
where Mr. Trump told him he could be brought into the tent.
Then, of course, Zuckerberg then settled the lawsuit brought
against them for four years ago. Meta settled for $25 million.
That is on top of the $2 million Meta and Zuckerberg
contributed to the inauguration.
It looks like these companies are agreeing to make these
payments to Donald Trump in kind of a pay-to-play measure. What
do you think, Mr. Aaron?
Mr. Aaron. I agree with your analysis, Congresswoman. It
looks like they're making payoffs. These were not cases--the
lawyers that looked at them, the law professors that looked at
them when they were filed said these are completely specious.
These are outlandish. These are not actually viable cases. Yet,
now that Mr. Trump is in office so many of these media
companies are lining up writing checks for tens of millions of
dollars to a sitting President either to say please take the
target off our back or to seek major regulatory favors like a
mega merger.
I don't support a mega merger, but the idea that the cost
of getting that merger done is altering your editorial content
or having to respond to your other business interests
challenged, your licenses taken away, it's unbelievable. It's
outrageous.
Ms. Lofgren. Well, I agree with you, Mr. Aaron. I am not
sure whether the President is shaking down these corporations
or whether they are offering him bribes because they realize
that if they pay the right price, they will get their way, but
it is clear to me that there are these outrageous settlement
payments to the President and his foundations--are really
incompatible with the free press.
Can you explain, Mr. Aaron, what happens to a free and fair
press, to journalism when media organizations and the President
are engaged in this type of pay-to-play? Is this something that
other media organizations are going to pay attention to? What
is the impact on the eco-structure?
Mr. Aaron. Well, I do think there's a danger that they
follow each other's leads, right? What we would like to see in
this case is these media companies actually standing up for
their rights and actually fighting these cases in court.
They've made, I would say, very unfortunately business
decisions, that they have decided the cost of settling because
it's advantageous to other parts of their business is better
than actually defending the First Amendment and free speech.
That's a huge problem because they are signaling to this
administration, hey, if you don't like something you see and
you file a lawsuit, you're probably going to get paid, or
they're saying, wow, we don't want to go anywhere near that
because we might face one of these outlandish lawsuits.
Ms. Lofgren. My time is expired, Mr. Chair. I yield back.
Chair Jordan. The gentlelady yields back.
The gentleman from Kentucky is recognized.
Mr. Massie. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Shellenberger, last Congress, you helped expose
censorship grants at the National Science Foundation,
specifically known as Track F grants. Can you tell us more
about those censorship activities conducted associated with
these grants?
Mr. Shellenberger. Yes. The National Science Foundation's
Track F was basically to create censorship tools that would
become the middleware to, such as, NewsGuard, for example, is
the most famous of which, or the Global Disinformation Index.
The idea is to essentially impose on people's systems, either
directly through their computers or adopted by social media
companies, a set of tools that would allow centralized
authorities to decide what the truth was and filter it for
people.
It is a horrifying program. All Track F, in my view, should
be eliminated, and I think there should be an investigation to
figure out, what in the world were they thinking when they
created a program to basically have the taxpayers subsidize the
creation of elaborate censorship tools that included the use of
AI in creating that censorship?
Mr. Massie. So, taxpayers are actually paying for the
government to help private companies censor their free speech?
Mr. Shellenberger. Yes, then the idea was that they were
just going to give these tools to Facebook, X, and others to
use or to give them to Microsoft and others to use. It is awful
stuff. By the way, it also came from the Department of Defense,
so much of those NSF grants are sort of recycling older DARPA
DOD projects.
Mr. Massie. When I coached T-ball, the kids shared helmets.
So, occasionally, there would be an outbreak of lice, and we
would comfort the parents by saying it is not a sin to get
lice; it is a sin to keep lice. So, with these Track F grants--
later today, I plan to reintroduce my bill to eliminate those.
I want to make a plea to the White House and anybody in the
Executive Branch who is listening or anybody at DOGE. You need
to go after these Track F grants and defund anything that says
mis-, dis-, or malinformation. Those are all, in my opinion,
Orwellian terms.
Also, we have an omnibus coming in March where I am scared
to death that we are going to refund all these things; we are
basically going to feed the lice that were contracted in the
last administration. This isn't just limited to NSF grants. The
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA, within
DHS is a flagrant violator of free speech. It had things like
Election Integrity Partnership.
Mr. Taibbi, can you tell us anything about this, what is
going on at DHS or CISA?
Mr. Taibbi. Yes. So, CISA was the--well, as we found in the
Twitter files, the Election Integrity Partnership was run by
Stanford. It had four partners, including the Center for an
Informed Public, University of Washington, Graphika, and the
Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Labs. They
partnered with CISA and the Global Engagement Center at the
State Department. We found in the Twitter files--and also,
Chair Jordan also found--some emails basically saying that this
EIP project was founded at the behest of DHS.
So, essentially, EIP was a CISA-created project or was a
CISA sort of sponsored project. It is essentially a content
moderation removal operation that was sponsored by the American
taxpayer.
Mr. Massie. Another example of American taxpayers
unwittingly knowing--well, unwittingly, without knowing--
funding their own violation or deprivation of their First
Amendment rights.
Mr. Shellenberger, can you explain how you traced USAID
funding that served as the basis for a whistleblower report in
2019, which led to the impeachment of President Trump?
Mr. Shellenberger. Sure. Well, you may remember that the
so-called whistleblowers in the White House were actually a CIA
analyst. In that whistleblower's complaint which led to the
impeachment, one of the central pieces of evidence was created
by a USAID-funded and controlled organization called the OCCRP.
We have another piece out today about how it participated in
the Russiagate hoax, as well, creating essentially very
important information leading to that.
So, you have in USAID a much larger fund of money and a
much broader strategy for information control that included
censorship but also, as I mentioned, taking control of
investigative journalism, really, worldwide. Its ambitions were
amazing.
So, that's an agency--when we saw that it got shut down by
DOGE, I thought that was completely appropriate. If there is
something in there that it was doing that is valuable, then you
could refund it later. My view, same thing with CISA--death
penalty for organizations that participated in violations of
the First Amendment, like CISA. Cybersecurity is an extremely
important function. It shouldn't be contaminated and undermined
by censorship activities.
Mr. Massie. It has always been known that our government
has funded the change in administrations, if we can say it
politely, of other governments. Isn't it borderline treason
when the taxpayer is--when organizations entrusted with
protecting our country are now undermining our own government?
Mr. Shellenberger. Absolutely. If you are trying to do
regime change, illegal--if you are weaponizing DHS, FBI, CISA,
that is treasonous regime-change activities redirected--that
you developed abroad, that we developed abroad for regime
change, and directed against the American people and our
representatives. It is shocking, and we still haven't dealt
with it as a country.
Mr. Massie. Mr. Chair, I see my time has expired. I would
like to introduce into the record, or ask unanimous consent to
introduce into the record, an article in Newsmax,
``Shellenberger: USAID Paid for Trump Impeachment Effort,''
dated February 6, 2025.
Chair Jordan. Without objection. The gentleman yields back.
The gentleman from Georgia is recognized.
Mr. Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Chair, Mr. Ranking Member.
Today's hearing entitled ``The Censorship-Industrial
Complex.'' It is puzzling to me that when we are talking about
censorship and denial of First Amendment rights, we are
talking--the witnesses here from the majority seem to be stuck
on Hunter Biden's laptop, mentioning it repeatedly, but nothing
uttered about what has been transpiring since January 20th,
when this President was inaugurated.
Free speech necessarily means freedom of press. Co-
President Trump has been talking for years about the press
being the enemy of the people.
Mr. Aaron, what impact has the President repeatedly calling
the press the enemy of the people had on our free speech?
Mr. Aaron. Well, I think it is very chilling. It is a big
problem when the most powerful person in the country, who is
tasked with upholding the Constitution and the First Amendment,
repeatedly goes out of his way to threaten journalists for
asking hard questions, to sue news organizations because he
simply doesn't like their conclusions. This is a real overreach
in his power, and it creates danger for journalists out there
actually trying to report on this administration as intended, I
assume, he's intended to do.
Mr. Johnson. He has been doing more than simply attacking
journalists. He has also been threatening confidential sources
of journalists. How does that chill free speech?
Mr. Aaron. Well, I do worry about any administration, and I
have worked with folks on this side of the dais over problems
of the government trying to go after whistleblowers, trying to
force reporters to hand over their sources. There were new
regulations put into place during the Biden Administration that
I hope offer some greater levels of protection. I don't know if
those are going to survive the new administration.
The Members of this Committee have supported the Press Act,
have supported important protections for journalists. We need
this because at a moment like this, we are reliant on
whistleblowers to know what is happening.
Mr. Johnson. We are also reliant on inspector generals, who
are essential for an ethical and transparent government. Yet,
during his first week in office, Co-President Trump illegally
fired 17 inspector generals, over 18 different Federal
agencies, and just yesterday, he fired the 18th inspector
general a day after that inspector general from USAID released
a report detailing the wasteful impacts of Trump's chaotic and
illegal funding freeze and stop-work order. The message was
clear that if you speak out, you will be fired.
Co-Presidents Musk and Trump clearly want to shroud their
administration's actions from public scrutiny while they
illegally freeze of Federal funds, purge Federal workers, and
rummage through sensitive private data that they can use to
retaliate against any critics who dare to speak up.
I am concerned about the firing of the watchdogs who dare
to speak up. Just this past week, this inspector general fired
for revealing more than $489 million in food assistance that
was at risk of spoilage or potential diversion after the Trump
Administration implemented its aid freeze and stop work order,
the very next day, he was fired, as I said.
Do you agree that it chills freedom of speech and
independent oversight when inspector generals are fired
literally the day after they release a critical report? What
message do you think that it sends to other whistleblowers who
might come forward?
Mr. Aaron. Well, it sends a message to whistleblowers that
nobody may be there to listen to you or protect you. The
inspector general system is incredibly important at exposing
government wrongdoing, no matter who is in power. These are
supposed to be independent people. It is my understanding that
moves against them are supposed to come before Congress.
Congress is supposed to be informed before it happens and that
hasn't happened here.
The wholesale of removal of inspector generals at a time
when there is so much confusion and chaos about what is
happening is very, very dangerous. I hope that this Committee
and others with jurisdiction here in Congress will be looking
very carefully at these decisions. I know the courts are
starting to get involved, but if we don't have these
independent watchdogs, we won't know what is happening. In many
cases, the press won't know what is happening because they are
relying on the information that an inspector general can get
that nobody else has access to on the outside.
Mr. Johnson. Well, I tell you I know that if inspector
generals had been terminated by a Democrat and this Committee
as it is now under the control of Republicans, these
Republicans would be through the roof about it. They would not
allow it to happen. It is troubling that they are so
transactional now that they don't believe in the Constitution;
they just simply will follow whoever is sitting in that seat
who can accomplish their political objectives, and then to hell
with the Constitution.
With that, I yield back.
Chair Jordan. The gentleman yields back.
Mr. Taibbi, do you have any idea how many people work at
the United States Department of Treasury?
Mr. Taibbi. No, I don't. I am sorry.
Chair Jordan. It is 108,376. Part of the Department of
Treasury, of course, is the Internal Revenue Service; is that
right?
Mr. Taibbi. Yes, it is.
Chair Jordan. Yes, a big part, frankly. A big part.
Thousands of people work there, too. On December 24, 2022, one
of those 108,376 employees of the Department of Treasury
decided they were going to start an investigation into you; is
that right?
Mr. Taibbi. Yes. That is my understanding.
Chair Jordan. That just happened to coincide with the day
you did one of the Twitter files, and one of the most important
ones, maybe the second one if I--second or third, but one of
those important Twitter files; is that right?
Mr. Taibbi. Yes, it was. It was a--
Chair Jordan. Then, a few months later, you are sitting in
that same seat testifying in front of this Committee, and at
the very time you are testifying, another one of those 108,376
people knock on your door, unannounced visit to your home,
which, by the way, they have discontinued because of this issue
and a bunch of other crazy things they were doing; is that
right?
Mr. Taibbi. That is right, Mr. Chair.
Chair Jordan. Just for the record, they actually owed you
money, right? You didn't do anything wrong; is that accurate?
Mr. Taibbi. They did. They owed me quite a lot of money.
Chair Jordan. Yes. Yes. OK. I just wanted to make that
clear, but obviously a way to intimidate someone who is
focusing on this issue we are discussing today, right?
Mr. Taibbi. Yes.
Chair Jordan. Now, we just got an order from a judge. A
judge in the Southern District of New York said that, ``no
political appointees or special government employees can have
access to information.'' The 108,376 people can have access to
information, but the people the President of the United States
selects--the guy who was elected by 77 million people, he can't
preliminary in joining--a preliminary injunction against the
defendants during the pendency of this from granting any
political appointees, special government employees, from any
access to that information.
I don't know about you, Mr. Shellenberger; I find that kind
of troubling. The 108,000 people can do it, at least one of
them. Christmas Eve, we got Federal Government employees
working hard on Christmas Eve, probably remotely working, going
after Mr. Taibbi, but the President of the United States can't
have people going to look and see if we can save some money for
the taxpayers. He can't do that according to this judge. Do you
think that makes sense, Mr. Shellenberger?
Mr. Shellenberger. It doesn't, and my understanding is that
the President controls the Executive Branch and the--
[Simultaneous speaking.]
Chair Jordan. Article II, Section 2, very first sentence--
Executive power shall be vested in the President--not the--in a
President of the United States of America. First sentence.
Mr. Shellenberger. Yes.
Chair Jordan. Yes. This judge says no, no, no, we got to
trust the--this is the fundamental issue. Do you trust the
unelected bureaucrats, it was Mr. Tiffany or Mr. McClintock--or
do you trust the guy who was elected by the people? I would
rather put our trust in the people who they put in the office
to do these things.
Now, you mentioned earlier, I am going to jump around here.
I am trying to get to all of you. Mr. Shellenberger, you
mentioned that USAID, which has been on the news of late,
spending taxpayer money and all kinds of stupid things, is also
involved in the censorship effort. I want you to just elaborate
on that a little bit because this is going on as we speak. I
want you to elaborate on that for the Committee if you would.
Mr. Shellenberger. Yes. It is important to understand that
USAID viewed this very holistically. It is important, if you
look at the Hunter Biden laptop case, which is an extremely
important case to understand because the FBI was weaponized,
and it weaponized the Aspen Institute to brainwash the entire
media, it wasn't just that they censored it. It was that they
changed the perception of the laptop. They created a perception
that it was something other than what it obviously was. That is
what these guys are trying to do.
These are called information operations, and USAID has been
in the process of taking over so-called independent
investigative journalism around the world and, at the same
time, training NGO's how to demand censorship. For example, Mr.
Aaron's organization has been working to train organizations to
so-called flag misinformation behind the scenes.
By the way, it is one thing to criticize somebody publicly,
which we should all be engaged in. This thing where you are
skulking around and secretly--
Chair Jordan. You do that all the time.
Mr. Shellenberger. Yes. That is what open democracy is.
This thing of going out and, like, secretly flagging
information behind the scenes and demanding censorship--that is
completely an abomination. That is not what our democracy is
about.
Chair Jordan. I just want to be clear. You are saying,
USAID, your investigation is now engaged in this prebunking
concept and process that they did with the laptop story in the
Fall 2020.
Mr. Shellenberger. Yes. It is the exact same approach, as
well, where often, what they are doing, for example, with
USAID, OCCRP, is that they are leaking intelligence from the
intelligence agencies--
Chair Jordan. Yes. Scary.
Mr. Shellenberger. --in a very--and not like WikiLeaks,
where they just dumped it, probably too much without the proper
redactions. They are strategically leaking it and then
manipulating places like The Guardian and The New York Times to
publish certain stories and control the whole investigative
news process.
Chair Jordan. We saw this from Yoel Roth's testimony. He
testified during these weekly meetings that they, Federal law
enforcement, communicated to us there was going to be hack-and-
leak operations before the Presidential election, likely in
October--so what is going to happen, when it is going to
happen, and then they said here who it is going to involve,
that there were rumors that the hack-and-leak operation would
involve Hunter Biden. So, they set him all up.
[Simultaneous speaking.]
Chair Jordan. So, they set him all up, and then shazam--
they set him all up because they had the laptop; they knew what
was coming. When it happens, everyone buys into what the 51
former intel officials say.
Mr. Shellenberger. That's right.
Chair Jordan. Ms. Subramanya, I want to give you the last
word. RFK--I just want you to know I appreciate the historical
perspective you brought when you testified last Congress. One
of the statements that stuck with this last Congress was
actually a statement made by RFK Jr., when he said, ``When you
look at history, it is never the good guys who are for
censorship.'' That's what we are trying to keep in mind and
stop it from both sides, from all sides. We want the First
Amendment. I will give you the last 30 seconds here to--
Ms. Subramanya. Absolutely. As you mentioned earlier, and
when I was here the last time, I think it was a throwaway
comment to a representative. It was not even part of my
testimony; I don't think so. I said the values of Western
civilization are worth fighting for, going back to the
Enlightenment and the Reformation. That is what gave us free
speech. That is what distinguishes us from the rest of the
world.
The First Amendment in America distinguishes America from
the rest of the world. I come from India originally. I live in
Canada. I am from Canada, but I have lived in India. I have
lived in the Middle East. I have lived in places where just
speaking your mind can send you to prison. You cannot criticize
anything that goes against the government or certain religions,
for that matter. When I came to the West, it was refreshing to
finally be able to express myself.
[Simultaneous speaking.]
Ms. Subramanya. Unfortunately, what I left behind has come
to me in Canada, has followed me to Canada. I am seeing that
happening in the United States, and it is very worrying because
it has happened so quickly. I don't know where this is going to
lead us to.
Chair Jordan. Yes. If we can't settle our disputes with
today, the alternative is frightening, and we never want to get
there. So, I appreciate all of you. I appreciate--from both
sides. We want to embrace the First Amendment.
Unfortunately, I have to run. Mr. Raskin and I have to run
to the House Administration Committee to talk about the budget
for this Committee. If you need--I should have said this. I
will say that if any of you need a break, we'll take it. Just
let us know. Just communicate with one of our staffers, and
we'll give you a break. If not, we are going to keep going.
I think it is--the gentleman from California is recognized
for five minutes.
Mr. Swalwell. For the last three years, Donald Trump
campaigned on lowering your costs. Do they feel lowered? Does
anything about his hearing get us to lower costs? You were
promised cheap eggs, and today, you are getting cheap shots.
There is probably no better natural remedy for insomnia than a
Congressional hearing on anticensorship.
Mr. Taibbi, you are here. Would you agree that censorship
is a suppression of ideas, words, images, and something that
can be conducted by the government?
Mr. Taibbi. Yes. It can also not be by the government, but
yes.
Mr. Swalwell. You would then agree that it is censorship
for any government, democratic or authoritarian, run by a
Democrat or a Republican, to bar the press from covering the
government when the press reports something government doesn't
like?
Mr. Taibbi. Bar in what way?
Mr. Swalwell. Take away their credentials, take away their
access.
Mr. Taibbi. So, as a longtime--I started my career as an
independent journalist. Journalists who whine about not being
credentialed should recognize that being on the outside is part
of what being in the press is. I am not terribly sympathetic to
people who complain about that issue.
Mr. Swalwell. So, if you report something that the
government doesn't like and they take away access that others
have, that is not censorship?
Mr. Taibbi. You can still cover it. That is not censorship.
Mr. Swalwell. OK. Banning books, is that censorship?
Mr. Taibbi. Banning books is censorship. Yep.
Mr. Swalwell. So, this topic is more complicated than the
hearing title would suggest, and I would argue the difference
between a democratic approach and democratic activists on this
issue and Republicans is that as Democrats seek to attack mis-
and disin-
formation, it is because their perception of information is
that it is a means to the truth.
For many Republicans, they believe that information is a
means to power. So, they are primarily concerned with using
information, whether it is disinformation or misinformation--as
long as it gets them to power, they are OK with it. It is
difficult to try and litigate, what do you do with mis- and
disinformation?
I will be honest with you. Sometimes democratic voices
object too much to mis- and disinformation. A lawyer once told
me when I was a young prosecutor that I was jumping out of my
seat too much, objecting to conduct by the defense attorney,
and while I was probably legally right, it was just annoying
the jury and that I should pick my battles.
So, I get frustrated, too, sometimes when it feels like the
penalty flag is being thrown too often. However, there is a
difference, though, between censoring somebody because you
disagree with them. I will credit Chair Jordan. He and I have
had some spirited debates in this hearing room. Sometimes they
have gotten quite personal by both of us. Sometimes when I land
a point, he gets upset. His staff will get upset. He takes it
like a man, and he will make his point right back at me, and I
take it like a man.
Who doesn't take it like a man? Donald Trump, because he is
not a man. He is a child. He is a small child, and he views
censorship as a means to get rid of people who disagree with
him. He wants to get rid of judges who disagree with him. He
said that as recently as yesterday. Speaker Johnson is backing
him up by suggesting that judges should just pause in
interpreting his violations of the Constitution.
Trump goes after his perceived political opponents. I know.
When I was a part of the Russia investigation, his DOJ
subpoenaed my emails and my cell phone records. He is a petty,
punitive child. I can recognize a toddler because I am a parent
of three of them, and I recognize the same behavior.
Yes, censorship is occurring. It is self-censorship, and it
is by you all, because I hear you in our private conversations
when you agree that Trump is a child. I hear the people you are
telling that Trump is a child, whether it is lobbyists or
reporters. You shrink in this room, and you shrink in the
chamber, and you self-censor yourselves from speaking out
because you are afraid. He is laughing at you that you take him
so seriously, because he is unserious. He is laughing that, you
think he is so powerful, because he is weak. He is laughing
because you think he is so big, because he is quite small.
So, we need you. We need your voices right now. It can't
just be this side. We are all in to speak up, and we need you
to speak up, too. Otherwise, we are all out of freedom. I yield
back.
Mr. Fitzgerald. The gentleman's time has expired, the
gentleman yields back. I am going to recognize myself for the
next five minutes.
Mr. Taibbi, the Twitter Files showed how the State
Department's Global Engagement Center, and I know you have done
some reporting on this, initially created to counter the
foreign disinfor-
mation campaigns, ended up censoring American speech directly
and by proxy.
It was established in 2016, $61 million, 120 employees.
What we have found now, through further reporting, is that at
the exit of the Biden Administration, they kind of shifted
things around to make sure that it was still viable and still
could operate.
Can you just explain, in general, what your reporting
discovered and what you have seen since then?
Mr. Taibbi. Sure. Thank you, Mr. Congressman.
The Global Engagement Center, which was an organization
that was unknown to us when we started the Twitter Files, and
it started off as a counter-terrorist organization. Sources I
spoke to that had worked there described the transformation of
their mission as CT to CP, counter-terrorism to counter-
populism.
We found Global Engagement Center reports on a variety of
topics within the Twitter Files. They also worked with the
Stanford Internet Observatory and the Election Integrity
Partnership. At the end of this year, they were set to expire
and be defunded.
Essentially, what happened was they took the same amount of
employees, they renamed themselves R/FIMI, and they scattered
the employees physically throughout the building in different
places to make it impossible or make it more difficult to
eradicate the agency.
Now, I am not sure how that has all panned out. My
understanding is that ultimately this will be defunded. Those
personnel and that money still exists, and they still have
exactly the same mission that was delineated for them in 2018
by legislation.
Mr. Fitzgerald. It was the way that they utilized what was
called ``bad speech'' and ``good speech,'' right? Can you
describe how they manipulated things that was presented to the
American public? A lot of this was initiated during COVID,
right?
Mr. Taibbi. Yes, so the Global Engagement Center, they had
a really important innovation in the whole evolution of the
digital censorship movement. They put up these reports. Some of
them were sort of old-school intelligence reports where they
actually used sources to identify accounts that were reasonably
linked to foreign governments or foreign intelligence or might
be bots.
Then they had this concept they called the information
ecosystem. That just drew in accounts whose messages were too
much in sync with those other accounts.
As a result, we had people who were completely innocent and
in many cases were prominent politicians, like there were
prominent Democratic politicians in Italy, for instance, and in
France, who were deemed part of the Russian ecosystem or the
Iranian ecosystem or the Chinese ecosystem.
This is just old-school guilt by association, and it was
part of their method. We found this repeatedly in their
reports.
Mr. Fitzgerald. Yes, the last question I had was so as the
Biden Administration leaves and they morph this group into
another kind of different size organization, the fact of the
matter is this is a perfect target for what DOGE is looking at
right now.
Because there is no way to really reform these
organizations, especially because they are part of the State
Department. So, it would be something that Secretary Rubio
would absolutely have to go in and either rework start to
finish, or just eliminate it. Is that correct?
Mr. Taibbi. I would think so. Again, the process of
scattering the organization throughout the building, and this
is a prime example of how it is so difficult to eradicate these
institutions once they have taken hold.
Mr. Fitzgerald. Yes, Mr. Shellenberger, I will just ask you
the final question, and that was that you talked earlier about
these types of organizations that are embedded, and then how do
you eliminate them, how do you change them?
Mr. Shellenberger. You really have my view that you have to
shut them down and reconstitute them with different rules,
different leadership, personnels, and policies. So, you can't
have somebody heading up CISA that thinks it is their job to go
around and to censor their fellow Americans.
You have got to have somebody there that is really
committed to cybersecurity, which is in their name twice. That
is how supposedly committed they are to it. So, any
organization that has that level of mission drift I think you
have got to shut it down and reconstitute it later. I hope
Congress considers doing that.
Mr. Fitzgerald. Thank you very much. My time has expired.
Ms. Crockett. Mr. Chair, I have an unanimous consent
request.
Mr. Fitzgerald. Yes, Ms. Crockett.
Ms. Crockett. We have heard over and over today that the
government was coercing social media companies to take down
specific content mainly targeting conservatives. You and I both
know this is not true because not one of the dozens of
witnesses--
Ms. Hageman. Point of order. What is the the UC request?
Mr. Fitzgerald. Ms. Crockett, what is the UC request, Ms.
Crockett?
Ms. Crockett. For the record, I would like to introduce
excerpts from transcripts of interviews with witnesses from the
social media companies who this Committee interviewed last
Congress. They all testified that there was no direct
coercion--
Ms. Hageman. You just need to put the document in. Point of
order, doesn't she just need to put the document into the
record?
Ms. Crockett. No, I need to--
Ms. Hageman. I don't believe that she needs to include any
explanation.
Ms. Crockett. I am asking.
Mr. Fitzgerald. Ms. Crockett, go ahead and finish your UC
request.
Ms. Crockett. It is May 16, 2023, transcribed interview
with a Meta Security Policy employee who confirmed that Meta's
hack and leak policy was not mandated.
Ms. Hageman. Again, point of order. Isn't it just a
document that goes in?
Mr. Moskowitz. Is this a hearing?
Mr. Fitzgerald. Without objection. Without objection.
Ms. Crockett. The second one is--
Mr. Fitzgerald. It will be--we don't need any further
description of the document.
Ms. Crockett. We have multiple documents.
Mr. Fitzgerald. Without objection, without objection.
Ms. Crockett. So, all my transcripts are in?
Mr. Fitzgerald. Without objection.
Ms. Crockett. OK.
Mr. Fitzgerald. We will go to the gentleman from
California, who is recognized for five minutes.
Mr. Lieu. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
The Trump Administration issued a series of Executive
Orders that are brazenly illegal and unconstitutional, and that
is why Federal judges appointed by Ronald Regan, George Bush,
and Donald Trump himself have halted a number of these orders.
None of these orders are designed to lower inflation or
lower your costs. Donald Trump campaigned on lowering prices.
He lied to you.
Congressional Republicans have also done nothing to lower
prices, and this hearing is a prime example. This Republican-
controlled Judiciary Committee could hold a hearing on price
gouging. The Republicans could hold a hearing on antitrust and
how monopolies are using their monopolistic power to raise your
prices.
No, we are holding a hearing on Twitter and Facebook, about
Twitter and Facebook. Are you kidding me?
I am going to show you a video now of what is at the top of
Americans' minds, which is inflation and grocery prices, and
specifically, the high cost of eggs.
[Video played.]
Mr. Lieu. Since that NBC News report came out, egg prices
have increased again. Fox News just recently reported the
wholesale price of eggs is now an average of eight dollars.
Donald Trump's indiscriminate tariffs that he has already
leveled and threatened to level are making things worse. I am
going to show you a video now what Donald Trump's tariffs are
doing to shoppers at Costco.
[Video played.]
Mr. Lieu. Trump's tariff war has turned into an egg war at
a Costco, everyone fighting for eggs at Costco.
I recently went grocery shopping, and the price of eggs
were between $7.99 and over $12, and not only were the prices
that high, but there were no eggs. There are no eggs on the
shelves.
That is leading the American people to realize that Donald
Trump lied to them and Congressional Republicans are not
focused on the issue that American people care about, and that
is why consumer sentiment has now dropped. That is a very
important factor for the economy. I am going to show you a
video about a recent consumer sentiment report.
[Video played.]
Mr. Lieu. Just today, it was announced that inflation
increased again. It is not just on eggs, it is also on meats,
poultry, and fish. On gasoline, fuel oil, used cars and trucks,
prescription drugs, car insurance, and rent. Congressional
Republicans are doing nothing to address this issue.
So, look, do I think it is obnoxious that Twitter bans the
term ``cisgender''? You can be punished and suspended for using
that term. Sure, it is obnoxious. That is not what the American
people care about.
They care about the No. 1 issue, which is inflation. Same
thing last year, same thing this year. Donald Trump and the
Congressional Republicans are doing nothing to address that
issue. In fact, Trump's tariffs are making things worse.
So, I urge our Congressional Republicans to get serious and
stop doing dumb hearings. I yield back.
Mr. Fitzgerald. The gentleman yields back. The gentleman
from Texas is now recognized.
Mr. Gooden. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It is so wild to me that, when we talk about an issue that
so much indicts the Biden Administration for the laws they were
breaking, that the only thing Democrats can do is call it a
dumb hearing, talk about bird flu, and say, here is one that
one of my colleagues said, ``Joe Biden is gone and we need to
be looking at what is happening right now.''
They spent the last four years talking about Donald Trump
after he left office, and now that the American people got what
they wanted, which is another four years of Donald Trump, they
don't want to talk about Joe Biden.
I don't want to talk about Joe Biden either, but I do want
to acknowledge the lawfare, the censorship, which is the whole
point of this hearing. I will mention I am glad that inflation
was brought up, because I do believe that we are going to
finally head in a good direction.
My colleague from California just spent two minutes talking
about eggs and the cost of eggs. The cost of eggs was up a
month ago, which is why the Biden Administration appropriated
or spent $300 million on bird flu. I am not even going to blame
Joe Biden for the cost of eggs or Donald Trump. We got a bird
flu going on. Yes, it is terrible.
Let me tell you something else that is terrible. That is
what this Committee uncovered that my colleagues from the Left
said wasn't a real thing. That is that Big Tech platforms
changed their content moderation policies because of pressure
from the Biden-Harris White House.
The Biden-Harris White House's censorship campaign targeted
true information, satire, and other content that did not
violate the platforms' policies. No one on the other side of
the aisle has indicated that they had a problem with that.
They have complained about Elon Musk, who is a private
citizen who runs a private company, perhaps not the way they
want him to. They have not acknowledge that the Harris, the
Biden-Harris White House was pressuring and instructing these
companies to censor conservative speech or speech that they did
not like.
I would love to insert into the record, I don't know if my
colleague from Dallas County inserted this letter from Meta's
Zuckerberg on August 26th. He spent two whole pages talking
about all the things that he was pressured to do by the Biden
White House. This was after Trump said I am going to lock up
anyone who interferes in this election.
My colleague from California mentioned that as if that was
some terrible threat to make. I am going to defend the
integrity of the election. Well, after Trump said that, this
letter came out, as if Mr. Zuckerberg was admitting, which he
did, that they have been breaking the law because the White
House had asked them to.
Mr. Shellenberger, I will ask you to comment, if you will,
I haven't heard any outcry or condemnation from the Left about
all this censorship from the Biden White House. I want all the
censorship to stop. What am I missing here?
Mr. Shellenberger. You are not missing anything. This,
look, the whole censorship industrial complex was created by
Democrats. It is really quite disturbing and depressing when
you think about it.
I was raised on the radical left, and what we had in common
with the liberal left was that we supported the Brandenburg
ruling. We supported Skokie.
We Democrats were supposed to believe in supporting,
allowing like Nazis to march through neighborhoods of Holocaust
survivors. That is what the Supreme Court has upheld. That is
how radical America's commitment to free speech is.
So, when I hear Members of Congress complaining that people
said something racist online and they weren't censored, I am
offended as an American by that. Free speech is kind of--we do
a lot of things badly in the United States. The one thing we do
well and have done well for 250 years is protecting free
speech.
When you see an entire political party get behind
weaponizing government to put their main political rival in
prison, create an elaborate censorship industrial complex, run
lawfare, and run information operations against their fellow
Americans, it is very disturbing.
The fact that we are still talking about what happened, we
should be talking about what happened. It was a woke reign of
terror for the last 12 years, where people were scared to say
their mind in public, in private.
We had these elaborate governmental apparatuses in place to
aggressively censor behind the scenes using law enforcement
organizations to do it. So, the fact that we are all still a
little upset about that, and we are very concerned about what
the Europeans are doing should be a little more understandable
for those of us that were raised in the true liberal spirit of
the Left.
Mr. Gooden. I appreciate that. I yield back.
Mr. Goldman. Mr. Chair, I have an unanimous consent.
Mr. Fitzgerald. The gentleman yields back.
Mr. Goldman. Mr. Chair, an unanimous consent request.
Mr. Fitzgerald. The gentleman's request?
Mr. Goldman. I ask unanimous consent to enter into the
record the Supreme Court's opinion in Murphy v. Missouri, and
specially footnote 4, which states that the factual findings
about alleged government censorship on social media ``appear to
be clearly erroneous.''
Ms. Hageman. Point of order. Doesn't the document just go
in?
Mr. Fitzgerald. Without objection, without objection.
The gentlewoman from Washington is now recognized for five
minutes.
Ms. Jayapal. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
There are many issues in this Committee's jurisdiction that
are top of mind for the American people, like the
Constitutional crisis that we face when the Vice President
suggests that we don't need to listen to the Judicial Branch.
When the administration takes repeated actions to undermine
the Article 1 powers of Congress, or how about if we use this
hearing to take on the giant profiteering corporations that use
monopolistic practices to raise prices and drive out
competition?
Remember when candidate Trump said that he was vowing to
reduce prices on day one? Well, here we are, almost one month
into the Trump presidency, and not only have Republicans done
absolutely nothing to lower prices, but their policies are
actually driving up prices, as today's financial data showed.
Instead of dealing with that, we are here wasting time on
repeatedly debunked accusations of censorship, even as the real
censorship is happening right before our eyes. Donald Trump's
assault on free speech rights through a series of Executive
Orders that dictate terms of allowable expression and
identities, demand political loyalty from all civil servants,
and punish anyone who dissents.
One of the Executive Orders requires Federal Government
agencies to:
Remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms,
communications, or other internal and external messages that
promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology and to cease
issuing such statements, policies, regulations, forms,
communications, or other messages.
This Executive Order has now been used by the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention to send out guidance prohibiting
the use of terms like gender, transgender, pregnant person,
trans-
sexual, and nonbinary.
Mr. Aaron, how does this lead to direct or indirect
censorship of employees in their role as private citizens?
Mr. Aaron. I think it is very concerning, Congresswoman,
the idea that to receive government funding to do scientific
research, to provide healthcare, to provide community services,
that you have to read from an approved list of words. If you
use one of the words that is on the banned list, you could lose
your entire funding.
You could have to fire your staff. You could have to get
rid of essential programs simply to push, speaking of ideology,
an ideological agenda. That is very, very worrisome, and so
unnecessarily cruel on top of it.
Ms. Jayapal. Transgender individuals constitute a small but
important minority of the Federal workforce. They serve in
public health, economic and national security positions,
alongside thousands of nontransgender coworkers.
What impact, Mr. Aaron, does censorship of transgender
employees have on the broader Federal workforce and its ability
to serve the American people?
Mr. Aaron. Well, it forces government employees to
essentially go into hiding, to have to hide who they are and
what their identity is. To feel that they're being watched by
their colleagues, to essentially ask their colleagues to erase,
erase their existence, whether that is from government websites
or from the ability to simply meet with other people in the
government who may share their identity.
I think it is a massive overreach that is really an attack
on all of us, it is an attack on all of us.
Ms. Jayapal. Another Executive Order directs the
termination of all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in
the Federal Government. As a result, staff at the National
Science Foundation have been combing through thousands of
active science research projects alongside a list of keywords
to determine whether or not those grants should be halted.
These keywords include words and phrases like ``activism,''
``equal opportunity,'' ``institutional,'' ``under-
represented,'' and get this one, ``women, women.''
Do these actions, Mr. Aaron, constrain academic freedom or
the ability of researchers to freely express their views?
Mr. Aaron. Well, it seems to be an insane way to decide
what our scientific researchers or other researchers should be
studying. The idea of cutting off funding via keyword as
opposed to evaluating independent academic projects as opposed
to evaluating, is this a good cure for a disease. Are we going
to be able to research cancer?
The idea that could be stymied or cutoff because somebody
used the wrong word? Incredibly chilling.
Ms. Jayapal. The NSF funds about 25 percent of basic
academic research in the United States, including critical
research on medical devices, quantum physics, and artificial
intelligence. What effect does mass censorship of NSF-funded
research have on our ability as a country to advance scientific
and technological development?
Mr. Aaron. The scientists need to be in charge of the
science. I think that is what it comes down to. The idea that
we are making decisions about what our research priorities
should be by inserting AI to look for keywords AI can barely
handle your airline reservations and get it right, or your
searches online. So, I think it is a big problem.
Mr. Fitzgerald. The gentlewoman's time has expired.
Ms. Jayapal. I thank the gentleman, and I yield back.
Mr. Fitzgerald. Yields back. The gentleman from New Jersey
is now recognized.
Mr. Van Drew. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
First, it is humorous to me. President Trump has been in
for three weeks. It is for about three weeks, right? You all
are blaming him for the inflation engine that was created over
the last four years. Come on, seriously? Realistically? Come
on.
Let me get to the real issue here. The real issue, Mr.
Chair, is the censorship that happened at so many levels of our
government and so many levels of our institution and our media.
It penetrated every single level of our society.
Let's just look at a little bit of what this Committee did
over the last few years. Look at social media. The Biden White
House colluded with Facebook to silence American citizens. They
censored satire. They censored dissent. They censored facts
they didn't like. It was censorship.
This Committee exposed it, and now even Mark Zuckerberg has
to say, in August 2024, he said he publicly regretted, he
apologized for what had happened because the compliance that
they had with the Biden Administration that used the Executive
Branch inappropriately.
Let's talk about more, let's talk about education. Let's
talk about our students and our professors. They came before
this Committee too, and they told us how they were punished for
holding conservative views, different views than the
mainstream.
It could happen to you all. It could happen to somebody
with a progressive view or a liberal view. It just isn't right.
Every view should be accepted, tolerated, and encouraged in
education. They were disinvited, they were deplatformed, they
were chased off the campuses by angry mobs.
At the University of Buffalo, conservative students were
physically attacked. At Cornell, a student called for stabbing
and raping Jewish women while professors continued to push
blatant anti-Israel objectives.
Mr. Aaron, I never heard you say a word about any of this.
At Tulane, Jewish students were beaten in a protest while
administrators stood by. At Berkeley Law, and these just a few
examples, student groups created Jew-free zones banning anyone
who supported Israel from speaking.
Because that is what it was about. Censorship, because our
free speech is the most powerful tool that Americans have. This
is all censorship. The Committee exposed it.
Let's talk about healthcare. Doctors were silenced.
Scientists were blacklisted. Intel officers suppressed DoD and
FBI findings on the lab leak. You remember the lab leak in
Wuhan? Impossible.
I said it and I was mocked, that it really possibly and
probably did come from a lab and not from a wet meat market.
That was a big joke back then. You were censored. You were
censored if you had a different opinion.
The CDC and the FDA withheld data on vaccine side effects.
It was censorship, and this Committee, again, exposed it.
The FBI, the Department of Justice, remember that stuff,
spying on conservatives. Spying on Catholic churches. They were
going to.
Spying on concerned parents and labeling parents who were
concerned about their kids and going to school board meetings
as domestic terrorists. They were trying to censor them. Using
FISA, worst of all, to go after millions of Americans
inappropriately. It was censorship, and we exposed it.
The ultimate censorship? The media, the legacy media, which
pretended none of it was happening. Most folks never got to
hear about it, didn't even know. There's still a lot of
Americans that don't know. It was all censorship.
Now, I hear the other side lecture us about the abuse of
power. Really, seriously, after what happened, after the last
four years. You got to be kidding. It is unbelievable.
I was talking to a reporter outside before, they said you
know, what is the one thing you regret. They were doing a
little bio on me and your years in politics and government.
What I regret, is that every single American didn't have to
sit here in these judiciary meetings and hear what is going on
to their country. I wish they knew, and they don't, because the
legacy media doesn't let it out. Barely covers it. Covers a
tiny fraction of it. I am surprised we have survived at all
with free speech.
Hour after hour, hearing after hearing, case after case, I
wish they were here. We fought back. We won for now. We are in
trouble around the world. Our country's in trouble. We still
are. We could really be losing our freedom. We could be going
into a dark age.
Mr. Shellenberger, I have questions for you really quick. I
don't have much time. Please just yes or no, sorry to do this
to you. Has President Trump, to the best of your knowledge,
ever pressured Facebook or Twitter to censor true information,
yes or no?
Mr. Shellenberger. I actually think you looked into this,
right?
Mr. Van Drew. I got to do this quick; I am running out of
time.
Mr. Shellenberger. We didn't see the request.
Mr. Van Drew. OK. Did President Trump ever--last question,
I can't get through them all, I will ask that they will be put
in the record. Did President Trump ever direct intelligence
agencies to work with social media companies to suppress
damaging news stories before an election?
Mr. Shellenberger. Not to my knowledge.
Mr. Van Drew. Did President Trump ever label parents as
domestic terrorists?
Mr. Shellenberger. No.
Mr. Van Drew. Did President Trump ever spy on Catholic
churches?
Mr. Shellenberger. No.
Mr. Van Drew. Did President Trump's DOJ ever pressure Big
Tech to silence political opponents?
Mr. Shellenberger. Not to my knowledge.
Mr. Van Drew. Did President Trump have done any of these
things, wouldn't the media say he was abusing power, if he had
done it?
Mr. Shellenberger. I am sorry?
Mr. Van Drew. If President Trump had done any of those
things, would the media say he abused his power?
Mr. Shellenberger. Absolutely.
Mr. Van Drew. Thank you. I yield back.
Chair Jordan. The gentleman from California.
Mr. Correa. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to thank you and
the Ranking Member for holding this very important hearing on
the First Amendment, and of course censorship.
Thank you also for all the panelists for being here. I
appreciate your recommendations and contributions.
Mr. Aaron, I want to turn to you first. I want to talk
about Main Street back home. We are talking a lot about
theories, discussions, but back home, people care about bread-
and-butter issues.
Over the past two weeks, more than 8,000 web pages on over
a dozen government websites were taken down, including over
3,000 pages containing healthcare information, CDC. They were
taken down until yesterday, when a Federal judge actually
ordered the public health pages put back up.
Some of those pages, information, guidance on vaccinations,
on autism. That is what people care about back home.
So, Mr. Aaron, we have vaccine mandates. Controversial.
Regardless of where people stand, how do people react in a
situation like this when the information they probably rely on,
paid for by Federal taxpayer dollars, research on these pages
is no longer available to them?
Mr. Aaron. I share your concern, Congressman, and I think
that we have a big problem, again, with taking the sledgehammer
to all these things.
Mr. Correa. Is this censorship?
Mr. Aaron. Is this censorship, is that the question, sir?
Mr. Correa. It is.
Mr. Aaron. Well, I want to be clear, the government does
have the ability to say this is what we are going to put on our
websites, to a point. They have the ability to say these are
our new priorities, all these things, right?
The problem we have is when that is extended out to
stripping away the most basic information that people need for
their health. When you are talking about doctors suddenly
unable to inform their patients about what is happening, we
have a more serious problem.
I think that is why the courts have intervened here,
because of the misalignment between--
Mr. Correa. Let me cut you off really quick. I am just
looking at the CDC.gov website. Vaccines and immunizations.
There is a little statement here. ``CDC's website is being
modified to comply with President Trump's Executive Orders.''
What would a parent say if they saw that?
Mr. Aaron. I think it is just confusion. I don't think
people understand why is the government taking away this basic
lifesaving information. Why are they taking away information
about diseases that people are suffering from?
Mr. Correa. The autism spectrum disorder website. ``CDC's
website is being modified to comply with President Trump's
Executive Order.'' This disclaimer is everywhere. What is a
parent, what is a doctor supposed to do when he reads this?
Mr. Aaron. I share your concern, Congressman, that the idea
that we are taking away basic health information, basic
scientific information, making it harder for people to just
know what's going on, especially when they are dealing with
serious disease and serious health problems.
It is very unclear to me why this would be a priority for
this administration, why they would be trying to take away
lifesaving information that people rely on.
Mr. Correa. Is there a chilling effect here on academic
research?
Mr. Aaron. No question, no question there is a chilling
effect.
Any time someone has to say before I can do my job, am I
using the wrong words? Anybody who is going to say if I make
the wrong choice in what I say as an independent scientist,
does that mean my funding is going to disappear.
Mr. Correa. Seventeen inspector generals fired. How does
that affect academic research, people working in these
agencies?
Mr. Aaron. Where is the accountability going to come from?
I think that is the question. When you get rid of the inspector
generals, where is the independent voice when there is a
problem, when people's research is being interfered with, when
government processes are broken or ignored?
Mr. Correa. Mr. Aaron, for people watching this back home
on TV, what is an inspector general?
Mr. Aaron. Well, as I understand it, Congressman, the
inspector general, right, is an independent office within a
government agency tasked with making sure that this agency is
following the law, ethics laws, other laws, and the procedures
of that agency. So, they have investigatory power within an
agency to be able to investigate and publicize government
wrongdoing.
Mr. Correa. To address fraud, waste, and abuse? To address
fraud, waste and abuse?
Mr. Aaron. Absolutely.
Mr. Correa. So, 17 of them were fired.
Mr. Aaron. The only reason to get rid of all the inspector
generals en masse is if you don't want them conducting
investigations.
Mr. Correa. Thank you very much, Mr. Aaron.
Running out of time. Mr. Chair, thank you very much.
Chair Jordan. The gentleman yields back. If it is OK with
our witnesses, we got, we will finish the top row here, and
then we will give you a quick five-minute break. Then we will
be back at it.
Chair Jordan. So, the gentleman from Virginia is
recognized.
Mr. Cline. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to echo your
comments from your introduction. What a difference several
years makes. While the censorship industrial complex is on the
run, it is not gone.
To that, I just say thank God for Donald Trump. Thank God
for Elon Musk. Thank God for DOGE, because we are uncovering
just where the tax dollars are going to fund the censorship
industrial complex.
Mr. Shellenberger, the U.N. finances initiatives related to
misinformation management or support, supports government
funding and third-party development of censorship tools and
technologies, correct?
Mr. Shellenberger. Yes.
Mr. Cline. You are aware that U.S. taxpayer dollars have
been used by the U.N. to develop and implement an AI-assisted
fact-checking tool to label speech as misinformation,
disinformation, and now information toxic or hate speech,
correct?
Mr. Shellenberger. Yes, sir, very disturbing.
Mr. Cline. In fact, in 2021, the U.S. gave the U.N.
Development Programme $190 million in taxpayer dollars. I
verify what they have developed has been tested in five
countries: Kenya, Honduras, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Zambia.
It is intended to expand to more countries. Does that concern
you?
Mr. Shellenberger. Extremely.
Mr. Cline. The U.S.--the U.N. has also partnered with other
players in the censorship industrial complex, including Crowd-
Tangle, a Facebook Meta-connected fact-checking tool. Meedan
got $250,000 from the National Science Foundation for
identifying and countering misinformation on closed messaging
platforms.
The International Fact-Checking Network, IFCN, a grant- and
fellowship-making organization to help fact-checkers, solution
providers, and other eligible organizations launch new and
innovative fact-checking programs and initiatives.
Do you see iVerify as part of a larger global trend toward
centralized control over information?
Mr. Shellenberger. Yes, and we didn't have a chance to get
to it, but USAID has been pushing digital IDs that would tie
people's bank accounts to their social media profiles. It is
out the Black Mirror. The idea would be that they would be able
to police and potentially de-bank you for something that you
said online.
It is extremely disturbing, and I was just kind of shaking
my head because after two years of this, we just keep
discovering more censorship initiatives hidden away in
different agencies, the U.N. and USAID. It is madness.
Mr. Cline. It is terrifying. You agree, programs like
eVerify, the one you just mentioned as well, could be
weaponized by authoritarian governments to silence dissent. You
have seen this as well.
Mr. Shellenberger. By our government.
Mr. Cline. Well, of course, by our government as well.
Ms. Subramanya, you have seen this as well.
Ms. Subramanya. Absolutely, I have seen the weaponization
of government to go after innocent people in my own country, in
Canada. The truckers' protest of 2022 was a great example of
that, where people who protested; they were de-banked. So, if
you were a grandmother somewhere donating $50 to the protest,
you were frozen out of the financial system.
It has a chilling effect, to the point that people are now
afraid of having their voices heard. They are afraid to express
themselves because the consequences of expressing yourself
freely in a country like Canada, a G7 country, people are
afraid to speak up.
I have only seen this in authoritarian countries that I
have lived in. That is something that should concern us all. It
is happening here.
Mr. Cline. It is up to us to lead.
Ms. Subramanya. Absolutely.
Mr. Cline. Do you think that the Biden-Harris
Administration's hostility toward free speech contributed to
the increased tax on free speech we were seeing abroad,
including pressure by foreign governments against American
companies to censor lawful speech?
Ms. Subramanya. Absolutely. I am glad you asked that
question, Representative Cline. When Elon Musk's free speech
rights were being attacked, and they are still being attacked
by the E.U. under the Digital Services Act, there was silence
from the Biden Administration.
You know what that did? That sent a strong message to the
rest of the world that the administration could not be relied
on to retaliate against governments that suppress the free
speech rights of Americans. That is a powerful message. That is
not good.
Mr. Cline. Absolutely. We have to continue to lead. I am
glad President Trump is leading. I am glad Elon Musk is
leading. I have got a bill in to end iVerify. It is called the
End U.N. Censorship Act. I hope we pass it in this Committee
and can pass it on the floor.
With that, Mr. Chair, I yield back.
Chair Jordan. The gentleman yields back. We will take a
five-minute break, and we have refreshments back there if you
need them. Then we will try to get back at it as quick as we
can.
The Committee stands in recess.
[Whereupon, at 12:40 p.m., the Committee recessed, to
reconvene at 12:51 p.m., the same day.]
Chair Jordan. The Committee will come to order.
The gentlelady from Pennsylvania is recognized. Oh, we have
got to wait for your witness. I just saw him here, I thought.
The Ranking Member is recognized.
Mr. Raskin. Thanks, Mr. Chair. I just wanted to ask for
four unanimous consent requests in answer to some of the things
that just came up.
One an article entitled, ''Trump Tried to Suppress Free
Speech on Twitter,'' published by the Washington Examiner,
February 9, 2023. An article titled, ``Twitter Kept Entire Data
base of Republican Requests to Censor Posts,'' Rolling Stone,
February 8, 2023. ``The Trump Administration Told Facebook and
Twitter to Remove Posts that Called for Tearing Down
Confederate Statues,'' Business Insider, June 26, 2020.
Finally, an article entitled, ``Yes, the Trump White House
Demanded Twitter Remove Chrissy Teigen's Tweet Calling Trump a
PAB,'' Vanity Fair on February 8, 2022.
Chair Jordan. Without objection. The gentlelady from
Pennsylvania is recognized for five minutes.
Ms. Scanlon. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our
witnesses for being here today.
With all the crises that the Trump-Musk tag team has
created in the past three weeks, it is disappointing but
perhaps not surprising that the Chair decided to waste
everyone's time today by rehashing for the third or fourth time
a second-rate conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly
exposed, debunked, and thrown out of court.
While we are wasting this time, the country is barreling
toward yet another budget crisis as Republicans squabble among
themselves. The President has turned the Federal Government
over to the author of Project 2025 and an unsupervised
billionaire, where they are generating a Constitutional crisis
per minute.
Their actions are imperiling both our national security and
Americans' health, safety, and economic security. So, pardon
our frustration that this Committee is failing to address the
very real and serious issues that are confronting our
Constitutional republic.
Now, this hearing is supposed to address government
censorship of free speech. The First Amendment, which protects
free speech and a free press, is the bedrock of our democracy.
A democracy only works when its citizens are properly informed.
Right now, both free speech and a free press are under
attack by this administration and Mr. Trump's billionaire
buddy, Elon Musk. In the past three weeks, we have seen the
Trump Administration use the power of the government and its
Big Tech allies not just to promote their own views and lies
about what they are doing, but to punish or silence those who
disagree.
We have seen the FCC reinstate complaints made by Mr. Trump
and his allies against ABC, NBC, and CBS that had already been
dismissed as being contrary to the First Amendment. We have
seen the FCC open new investigations into other news outlets
that have aired coverage with which the President disagrees.
The White House has gone on a firing spree to silence the
independent watchdogs who have exposed alleged corruption and
misconduct by, you guessed it, Mr. Musk and the President.
Reporters have been evicted from Pentagon office spaces to make
room for Right-wing media.
Just yesterday, the White House barred an AP reporter from
the Oval Office because AP made an editorial decision to refer
to the Gulf of Mexico by the name by which it has been known
for over 400 years.
We have seen books, websites, employees, research, and
whole Federal departments being purged of speech, information,
and work, ranging from healthcare to civil rights to consumer
finance, if they don't align with the Trump Project 2025
manifesto.
So, I agree with Ranking Member Raskin that our country is
actually in a First Amendment crisis as a result of the actions
taken by the Trump Administration and its agents.
Mr. Aaron, I wanted to inquire further about the concern
raised by you and Mr. Raskin about collusion between the
government and powerful tech executives, particularly in the
case of White House special government employee Mr. Musk.
Mr. Musk has a long history of silencing his critics, but
what is different now is that Mr. Musk is a Member of the Trump
Administration and he is in charge of the extremely
destructive, rapid, unscheduled disassembly of Congressionally
authorized and funded government departments.
So, not only is he not an elected bureaucrat, but as with
the rest of this administration, he is resisting all oversight,
whether by independent watchdogs, Members of Congress who have
not abdicated their Constitutional duties, or the press.
Just last week, as national concerns were mounting about
the White House encouraging Mr. Musk to root around in
Americans' private financial and national security data, a The
Wall Street Journal investigative reporter managed to uncover
concerning information about members of Mr. Musk's shadow
government team.
Mr. Musk called for the journalist to be fired for
reporting accurate information relevant to oversight of the
work he is allegedly performing at the direction of the White
House. Basically, for performing a core First Amendment
function.
Can you comment on the First Amendment implications of Mr.
Musk's attacks on journalists, particularly given his new
quasigov-
ernmental status and the Big Tech megaphone that he controls?
Mr. Aaron. Thank you, Congresswoman. I do agree with you
that this is really unprecedented, where we see someone with
this much government power and this much media power combined
together with really no oversight or accountability. So, we are
seeing slashing funds that Congress has approved. We don't know
what they are.
Those trying to report on it, those trying to say who is
going in with their laptops into the Treasury Department, into
the Bureau of Fiscal Services, into all these places,
downloading private information, inserting AI.
Reporters are trying to get at that story. Those who did,
including uncovering troubling information about some of the
people who have been given this immense power and access inside
the government, suddenly become targets themselves. They become
targets themselves because of Elon Musk's incredible social
media megaphone, which he has used to put his tweets front and
center and in front of everybody.
When Elon Musk says this person is a target, they very much
become a target. That is what we should be concerned about,
that kind of government overreach and censorship. Because Elon
Musk is no longer just the head of Twitter or the head of X.
Elon Musk is a special government employee, meaning he is
not only combining his media power, but now his massive,
massive governmental power, which he is claiming entitles him
to cancel contracts and fire people and do away. He points all
that at a reporter simply trying to do their job.
That is government overreach. That is censorship and a
violation of the First Amendment, I believe.
Chair Jordan. The time of the--
Ms. Scanlon. Thank you. Mr. Chair, I would request
unanimous consent to enter into the record yesterday's
statement from the Associated Press in which the outlet
describes how the White House violated the First Amendment by
blocking its reporters from the Oval Office.
Chair Jordan. Without objection. The gentlelady yields
back.
The gentleman from Alabama is recognized.
Mr. Moore. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the witnesses
being here today.
The Biden-Harris White House has censored campaigns and
certainly they have targeted information satire, like our
friends at Babylon Bee and other content that did not
necessarily violate the platforms' policies.
Mr. Taibbi and Mr. Shellenberger, I kind of want to dig in
a little bit with you guys on the Twitter Files and let you all
tell us a little bit about what you found.
So, Matt, what was some of the, I guess some of the really
most revealing things you found as you were going through the
Twitter Files?
Now, Elon Musk I understand was a Democrat. You were a
Democrat. You admitted being a Democrat. Now, we are seeing a
shift. Tell me, Mr. Taibbi, (1) what is it that causes the
shift? (2) What did you find that troubled you the most as you
were going through that?
Then, Mr. Shellenberger, I will want to pick your brain a
little bit on that too.
Mr. Taibbi. Mr. Congressman, thank you for the question. I
don't know the answer to the question of what caused the shift.
It is a mystery that we have all been trying to look into for
years now.
I don't know why there is a sudden concern when Donald
Trump or Elon Musk does something, but nobody stood up even for
Democrats when they had their speech suppressed.
In the Twitter Files, we found requests from the FBI that
Aaron Mate from The Gray Zone be removed at the behest of the
Ukrainian secret services. Nothing, no media, major media
organizations covered that.
In terms of academic freedom, one of the first things that
we found was that Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who is in line to be
the head of the NIH, that he was on a trends black list at
Twitter, that was on the first day of the Twitter Files we
found that. Nothing, nobody covered that, they called it a big
nothing burger.
Same thing with doctors like Harvard's Martin Kulldorf or
the University of California's Aaron Kheriaty when they
criticized lockdowns. They were deamplified and/or removed. So,
academic freedom, suddenly it is a big concern. I agree it is a
big concern, but it is a concern in both places. So, it is very
frustrating to see that shift.
Michael, do you have anything?
Mr. Moore. Yes, Michael, if you don't mind, talk a little
bit about maybe the Twitter Files, and two, this shift and now
where you are seeing people who would normally identify as
liberal maybe are now coming to the side of our party or to
political argument for conservatives to say hey, free speech
matters? What you say, you should be allowed to say what you
want to say in a free market, so.
Mr. Shellenberger. Yes, my view is that Democrats will look
back at giving up the free speech issue to Republicans as just
a catastrophic political failure.
I have changed my mind on a lot of issues, written two
books about it. I never changed my mind about free speech,
never changed my mind about the illegality and immorality of
weapon-
izing government.
When you look at the history of it in the 1930s, the
repression by the FBI was against the Left, against the radical
left. You look at the defense of flag-burning. That was by the
Left. You look at defense of free speech, often it is by the
Left.
It has been a reversal. The Left, the Democrats came to
embrace the weaponization of--and censorship because they
became so powerful and so entitled at ruling under the Obama
Administration, I believe. The intelligence services--
Mr. Moore. I was going to ask you when you thought it
started, but you said earlier about 12 years you could
remember. Certainly, Biden-Harris kind of doubled down on what
Obama started. Go ahead, sorry, didn't mean to interrupt.
Mr. Shellenberger. Yes, no, that is right. I just think
Obama, after eight years of Obama, they transformed. The
intelligence community became much more Left-leaning, much more
partisan.
So, there is an inorganic and an organic part of the
weapon-
ization and censorship, but clearly you see people we reported
on the activities of John Brennan, Obama's CIA Director
authorizing reverse targeting or bumps to basically instigate
the whole Russiagate hoax.
You see these partisan actors in the intelligence, in the
deep State agencies, engaging in these activities. You see
Democrats as well. That is just bizarre for anybody that has
studied this.
Mr. Moore. Yes, it is like the Chair mentioned, just the
fact that the IRS happened to knock on Matt's door the day he
was testifying here. The whole system itself, whether it was
Big Tech and the Federal Government, that is a terrifying
option when you see those people working together to target the
free speech of American citizens.
So, it wasn't just Twitter, Matt. I think we saw a memo
where Meta, you said Meta, actually maybe Facebook, had been
targeted more, I guess by that administration. A little more
difficult to get their message out or a little more stringent
on how they allowed them to speak freely.
So, you want to maybe touch on that a little?
Mr. Taibbi. Yes, this Committee did an extensive report on
the Facebook files. They uncovered emails showing repeated
requests from the White House to be deamplify figures ranging
from Tomi Lahren to Tucker Carlson constantly.
We also found in the Twitter Files similar communications
from the same people. Also, reporter Alex Berenson found this
out about his own account, from The New York Times he found
this.
They repeatedly pressured Twitter to take down true
information, true reports. These, again, were--he is not even a
conservative. He was a long-time The New York Times reporter
who was removed from the platform. Again, silence from the
mainstream press during that time.
Mr. Moore. Yes, I never could figure out who the fact-
checkers were, Matt.
Anyway, I yield back, Mr. Chair.
Chair Jordan. The gentleman yields back. The gentlelady
from North Carolina is recognized.
Ms. Ross. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I am thrilled that I got to go after Mr. Moore because I am
hoping that our witnesses today will apply their same strict
construction on the First Amendment to the Donald Trump
Administration. I hope it doesn't matter who you think is
violation people's free speech rights, who is doing the
censoring, that you will have the same ethics and the same
integrity.
I myself worked for the ACLU. I represented people whose
speech I did not agree with. I believe we need a robust
protection of the interchange of ideas.
However, today, not last session when we had these
hearings, today the greatest threat to free speech in America
comes not from the media, not from Big Tech, but from Donald
Trump himself.
He has just made that plain. You don't even have to look
around or have an investigative report. He is just telling us
what he is doing. So, this hearing today, unless we talk about
the Trump Administration as well, is not about protecting the
First Amendment.
Rather, it is a distraction from the fact that the Trump
Administration is actively working to chill speech, intimidate
reporters, manipulate the flow of information, and manipulate
the American people. All true First Amendment threats from the
leader of the free world.
Let's be very clear. Trump thinks the First Amendment only
applies to speech he agrees with. His administration, as we
have heard, is purging journalists from press briefings,
silencing reporters who dare to challenge him. CNN, the
Washington Post, and The Hill, all evicted from their Pentagon
offices and replaced by outlets more favorable to the
administration.
We just had the recent AP kerfuffle over the Gulf of
America. Why? Because this administration does not want
accountability. It only wants propaganda.
Trump's own media company, Truth Social, same name as what
they call the Russian news sources, Pravda. Pravda means truth.
Did he rip it off from Vladimir Putin or the Soviets who
invented that in the first place?
It is not just the press. He is going after whistleblowers,
firing inspector generals, purging career government employees
who refuse to bow to his demand. He is sending a message. Speak
out or simply do what you were hired for, and you will be
punished.
He has done this before. He has done it in court cases, he
has done it as a private citizen. Now, he has the weight of the
government behind him, and that is why the First Amendment is
implicated.
Now, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, if they
really cared about censorship, they would be condemning these
blatant abuses of power that leave our Nation less safe.
Instead, they either sit silently or they enable it.
Let's talk about Big Tech. My Republican colleagues spent
years attacking social media companies, claiming they were
biased against conservatives, also starting their own, all
because the Biden Administration flagged certain posts,
including one telling Americans to drink bleach during the
height of the pandemic.
Now, Big Tech, because it is in their financial interest,
is cozying up to Trump. They are rolling back content
moderation, allowing disinformation and even hate speech to
spread unchecked. Reports show that Trump and his allies are
pressuring tech companies, making sure their voices are
amplified while dissenting voices are drowned out.
If you didn't like it during the Biden Administration, you
have to condemn it during the Trump Administration. Facebook,
also known as Meta, has gutted their content moderation and
safety teams, rolled back hate speech standards, and when Trump
was asked if the decision by Meta was a direct response to
Trump's threats to Mr. Zuckerberg in the past, he said,
``Probably.'' Yes, probably.
When we talk about the First Amendment, it has to apply
across the board. I am frankly glad we are having this hearing
today so that we have the opportunity to raise these concerns
so early in this very dangerous administration.
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I yield back.
Mr. Nehls. The gentlelady yields. I now recognize Mr. Kiley
for five minutes.
Mr. Kiley. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Today's hearing is an opportunity to acknowledge the
jarring reality that for some years we did not have a
functional First Amendment in this country. The vast powers of
the Federal Government were mobilized to do the very thing that
the First Amendment forbids, that is, abridge the freedom of
speech of American citizens.
By using its influence over a few tech companies, its
ability to pressure, to influence, to cajole, the government
was able to conduct censorship at a scale and at a breadth that
the founders could scarcely even have imagined and took it to
extremes that none of previously would have imagined.
It is now part of the history of this country, it is a
chapter in our history that the sitting President of the United
States was removed from all the leading social media platforms,
the leader of one of the parties, the major parties in our
country was removed from the platforms.
It is now part of this history of this country that
damaging information about a Presidential Candidate was
suppressed on the eve of the election. Then, when it came to
perhaps the most significant global event in a generation,
COVID-19, the government assured that citizens were not even
allowed to provide a truthful account as to how the pandemic
began. You were not allowed to say two plus two makes four.
You also were severely restricted in your ability to
provide your opinion on what the proper governmental response
was. Folks had their posts deleted for even daring to suggest
that a two-year-old shouldn't be forced to wear a mask for
hours on end each day.
Of course, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly
acknowledged, this has a chilling effect where folks then were
forced to steer far clear of whatever that line of censorship
might be. For every post that was censored, there were many,
many other things that were suppressed as a result.
I think this is also an opportunity to acknowledge how
important the oversight of this Committee was. In fact, it is
probably, it is likely some of the most important oversight,
Congressional oversight, that has been done in the history of
the U.S. Congress, is that by exposing what Mr. Shellenberger
has called the censorship-industrial complex, we were able to
get tangible outcomes where censorship outfits were ended,
specific, tangible censorship operations were ended.
You even had Mark Zuckerberg come out and detail exactly
the governmental pressure that was brought to bear on him. He
even went so far as to say that what Elon did for the Twitter
Files, Jim Jordan did for the entire industry.
Beyond those specific results, I think that this oversight
effort has also been successful in preventing censorship from
becoming a norm in American life, which is I think a very
important result.
We forget that freedom of speech is historically anomalous.
It is somewhat counterintuitive. It is not even embraced by
many of our nominally democratic allies around the world today.
We got frighteningly close to this deeply embedded norm of
our country's DNA of the freedom of speech, of that starting to
really weaken. It is going to be important going forward to
have guardrails in place to ensure that these sort of
censorship efforts don't repeat themselves.
Mr. Shellenberger, if we accept the premise, which I think
is true, of course that the censorship industrial complex is on
the defensive and certainly in retreat, in the Federal
bureaucracy, we need to stay on guard.
Are there other sites where it might be reposed? You have
mentioned global institutions, but in particular our home State
of California, with bureaucracies that are just as if or not
more Orwellian than some of these Federal bureaucracies, with a
Governor who has vowed to Trump-proof the State. As well as it
being the home to most of the major tech companies.
Do you see risks there, and how might we conduct oversight
to make sure that doesn't happen?
Mr. Shellenberger. Yes, absolutely. In fact, our friend and
colleague, Andrew Lowenthal, just published a report about
efforts at the State level to promote censorship. As you know,
one of the big pieces of censorship that Governor Gavin Newsome
promoted and others promoted was having doctors be censored for
not prescribing the official orthodoxy when it came to COVID.
The other thing we see is a lot of media literacy programs
are called media literacy. They are basically just teaching
kids to accept whatever the mainstream news media tell them
without questioning it.
It is the opposite of what John Dewey created with his
critical thinking program in the University of Chicago, this
incredibly important promotion of the idea of how to think
critically, not relying on expert sources, always being
skeptical. I do think there is a lot of work that we need to
do, and certainly our home State is a place to start.
Mr. Kiley. Thanks very much. Thanks to all the witnesses
for your testimony and your assistance in this entire effort by
this Committee, and I yield back.
Mr. Nehls. The gentleman yields. Mr. Balint, you are--yup,
Ms. Balint, sorry, you are recognized for five minutes.
Ms. Balint. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Let's talk about the real censorship that is happening
right now. We don't need some complicated hypothetical deep
State plot because we are 3\1/2\ weeks into the Trump
Administration and it is actively suppressing free speech, and
it textbook authoritarianism. This whole conversation has
become so twisted and so confused, so I want to bring us back
to some basics.
Mr. Aaron, is it accurate to describe censorship as the
suppression of certain words that are considered politically
unacceptable?
Mr. Aaron. I think if the government is doing that, that
smacks of censorship.
Ms. Balint. Yes. Is it true that the government may
intentionally try to chill speech by threatening legal action
or other consequences to intimidate a speaker into silence?
Mr. Aaron. That's certainly true.
Ms. Balint. So, censorship can take several forms. It can
be the government banning speech. It can be the government
creating an environment of fear that suppresses speech. I want
to look at some of the examples that we are seeing right now
with Trump attacking free speech.
Last week Trump's guy in charge of the agency that is
supposed to ensure fair access to the media and internet, the
FCC--his name is Brendan Carr--he opened an investigation of a
radio station that reported on an ICE raid. Mr. Aaron, is the
government chilling or limiting speech when it threatens to
investigate journalists for literally reporting the news?
Mr. Aaron. I think it's a huge problem. The First Amendment
protects the rights of reporters to cover what the government
is doing. That's what the radio station in California was
doing, it was reporting on something of very important
community interest. So, the idea the FCC would respond with an
investigation, with threats is incredibly chilling to
reporters' ability to do their jobs.
Ms. Balint. Yes, it is outrageous. These are the normal
operations of any news organization.
Let's see what it looks like when the Trump Administration
intimidates and censors Americans. Let's look at something more
direct, more immediate. Trump's anti-DEI orders have resulted
in a ban on using certain words in federally funded research.
My colleague Ms. Jayapal touched on this earlier. I want to
pick up this thread. There is a list circulating at the
National Science Foundation banning the use of words like
disability, socioeconomic, and even women. It is completely
absurd that they are searching for when the word women is being
used in federally funded research.
Mr. Aaron, is the government limiting speech when it bans
the use of specific words like women?
Mr. Aaron. If the government is saying that you will be
ineligible for funding based on your free expression, we have a
big problem.
Ms. Balint. We do have a big problem. Trump has made it
clear that one of his biggest targets for censorship is in fact
American women. On day one Trump removed any mention of
reproductive health resources from government websites. This
purge included information on privacy protections under HIPAA,
the law that keeps our health information private. The Trump
Administration also completely shut down
reproductiverights.gov. At the CDC officials removed
contraceptive guidelines and web pages related to HIV testing.
In fact, more than 8,000 government websites have been taken
down in the last two weeks. This kind of censorship puts
American women at risk.
Mr. Aaron, is the government limiting speech when it purges
websites of previously public information?
Mr. Aaron. I certainly think it is a terrible practice that
endangers public health. The government has its own views, and
they can make their own websites, but the idea that they would
strip away basic public health information that people need to
make sure their kids are OK, understand what medicines are, all
the research priorities, that seems far out of bounds.
Ms. Balint. Shocking. It is shocking. I want to bring it
back closer to home, my home State of Vermont. At the
University of Vermont professors are now fearing that there
will be Federal retribution based on what they are teaching in
class. Scientists can't conduct critical research because the
world's largest funder of medical research has banned again;
let me say it again, the use of the word women in research.
What we are seeing on the ground is not a liberal social media
industry. You want us to believe that the tech billionaires in
the front row of Trump's inauguration are fighting for working
people, fighting for a liberal agenda? Give me a break.
I yield back.
Mr. Nehls. The gentlelady yields.
I now recognize Mr. Fry. You have five minutes.
Mr. Fry. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I am fascinated by this discussion. I really appreciate you
all lending it because I think one of the biggest issues in
this last election was this censorship industrial complex. Of
course, you guys uncovered a lot of that with the Twitter Files
and the like. The American people were rightly frustrated that
the First Amendment was absolutely bastardized by this last
administration. It happened at the Presidential level, and it
happened if you were a doctor or if you were an individual
concerned about the health and well-being of your family. It
happened relentlessly. We have seen it.
I would think that there might be some recognition on the
other side that, you know what, maybe we over-extended
ourselves. Maybe we should not have gone this far to corrupt
the First Amendment the way that we did. I am not really
hearing that today.
Congressman Fitzgerald briefly touched on the State
Department's Global Engagement Center, and I would like to
continue that discussion on how the Biden-Harris Administration
used the GEC to demonetize domestic media outlets and
conservative voices.
Mr. Taibbi, the Washington Examiner journalist Gabe
Kaminsky reported that after Republicans ended funding for the
GEC the Biden-Harris Administration made a last-ditch effort to
keep it afloat by realigning GEC staff under a new entity, the
Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub.
Would you say that this hub was just simply a re-branding of
the GEC?
Mr. Taibbi. Yes, Congressman, absolutely it's a rebranding.
Its mission statement is identical to the mission statement of
the GEC as described in the 2008 legislation--2018 legislation.
Ms. Fry. Is the re-branding of the GEC an attempt to
continue censoring information then, particularly conservative
voices that the former administration and its allies deemed to
be bad information?
Mr. Taibbi. That would be my impression. It's important to
talk about what Gabe Kaminsky found when he did his series in
the Washington Examiner that the GEC was funding organizations
like the Global Disinformation Index and the Institute for
Strategic Dialogue. American money, taxpayer money sent
overseas to foreign entities which in turn are scoring domestic
media outlets and sending that information to digital
advertisers like Zander and other companies.
We have up-ranking of the Washington Post, Politico, NPR,
down-ranking of The Federalist, Washington Examiner, and other
organizations. So, we're picking winners and losers. I say this
not as a political conservative, but that's the facts of the
situation that's what that money was going for.
Mr. Fry. Thank you. What role do you think Congress should
take to stop those practices from occurring in the future?
Mr. Taibbi. The idea of preventing the spending of money on
media scoring operations, picking winners and losers--that's
not the government's job to try to help one media company
succeed over another. That's one of the reasons why we have
such terrible media, frankly, is because companies that do a
terrible job reporting--they should be accountable to the
market. When they have artificial ability to survive thanks to
these subterranean maneuvers, that's one of the reasons why we
have such a bad press.
Ms. Fry. Yes, I would agree with you on that. Following
this Committee's work last Congress a group of advertisers
actively colluded against conservative media shutdown.
Mr. Shellenberger, what role should Congress, the FTC, the
DOJ, have in preventing the next GARM from resurfacing and
colluding to the detriment of speech?
Mr. Shellenberger. Eternal vigilance. God bless you all for
what you did around GARM. It was incredible.
This was one of the stories that we uncovered--we had a
whistleblower bring to us something called the Cyber Threat
Intelligence League, which was an early censorship effort in
2019. They were basically taking all these military tactics
developed abroad for counterinsurgency, repurposing them into a
new manual, a new handbook for how to do it at home. It
included this advertising pressure, which has been a key
component of it. You can see multiple things are going on.
They're creating these supposed nongovernmental organizations
to then flag information to be censored. They're putting
pressure on the advertisers. They're trying to change the terms
of service at the social media companies.
One that Matt just talked about is this group Internews,
which we just discovered like five minutes ago, which has been
spending hundreds of millions of dollars and the head of it has
been out there, World Economic Forum, advocating, pressuring
advertisers. That's our taxpayer money going to an organization
that's demanding pressure on advertisers to demand more
censorship of social media platforms.
Mr. Fry. By default, at least under the old regime, the
American taxpayer is funding the demise of the First Amendment
if we don't do anything about it?
Mr. Shellenberger. The good news is that if you defund the
thought police there's not many people out there that want to
independently fund the thought police. So, if the government
stops funding it, we do think it will shrink quite a bit.
Mr. Fry. Thank you for that.
Mr. Chair, I yield back.
Mr. Nehls. The gentleman yields.
I now recognize Ms. McBath for five minutes.
Ms. McBath. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank each of you for being here today and giving us your
witness testimony. I have read your testimoneys, and I want to
say we as Americans have fantastic opportunities endowed by our
First Amendment protections. We are given the change to be a
better informed and more expressive society, but with such
privileges comes a great deal of responsibility.
Many of us get our information from the news. Yes, we are
getting it from social media, too. We share our musings or our
special moments and photos of your meals. Many of our children
are either/or they will soon be on social media and will have a
direct line to the world with all its information and
misinformation.
As online bullying grows in its prevalence the role of
regulation and responsibility of social media companies becomes
substantially significant. In the same way you cannot believe
everything that you hear and everything that you see, you
cannot trust that people will be any more honest online behind
the veil of the internet and a keyboard.
On many of these social media sites a 50-year-old man can
pose as a 15-year-old girl and a potential predator could pose
as your child's very best friend. Sensitive information like
personal details or photos are too often shared without the
consent of those depicted and we have begun to see the terrible
impacts of bullying online and shaming.
There are far too many stories of parents that are losing
their children to self-harm because these companies either
don't take action fast enough or downright fail to implement
policies to keep our kids safe.
We recently celebrated the passage of my bipartisan law to
protect our kids from online exploitation and empower law
enforcement to catch predators who have sensitive or explicit
material. I want to recognize those families of young people
who have been lost to instances of online targeting for their
courage and strength in sharing their stories. I know how
difficult it can be, and we are grateful to have you with us in
the fight to change our laws and hold these companies
accountable.
Let's be honest, today's hearing is a distraction and
undermines the very real pain and confusion that far too many
families feel when some of the most powerful tech companies in
the world fail to protect our children. Social media companies
bear the responsibility of preventing harm and monitoring
sensitive content that can endanger our loved ones and should
not be intimidated by the powerful few when enforcing safety
standards.
Those of us on this side of the aisle at least are focused
on the needs of American families over the needs of a wealthy
few who attempt to control the flow of information online and
in our media. We will hold them accountable.
Mr. Aaron, my question is for you. If social media
platforms are prohibited from enforcing their community safety
standards and news media outlets are unable to carry out
responsible journalism for fear of retaliation by extremely
wealthy individuals, how are these platforms likely to change?
Mr. Aaron. Well, I do think we have a concern if social
media platforms aren't able to make their own decisions as
private companies and be responsive to the needs of their users
who have asked for them to address the kinds of threats and
dangers that you're talking about. We want them to be able to
do that without fear of government retribution. Their own users
are not telling them that they want them to keep up hateful
content, calls to violence? Obviously, anything illegal they
should act on, but their own users are asking them to moderate
content to improve their experience.
I believe that as private companies they do have their own
rights, their own speech rights to make some of those
decisions. If we force them, I think that's a problem. I don't
think that's the role of the government. I think it's the role
of the users to keep them accountable. I've spent a lot of time
haranguing these companies, as I'm sure others have. We're
going to have to continue to do that.
I think when it comes to the media, obviously if they are
living in fear of retribution, they are under the thumb of the
administration, their bosses are signaling that they will not
back them up when their journalists are out there trying to
report, then we have a serious, serious concern and I think a
real threat to free speech.
Mrs. McBath. Well, thank you so much. We are on a slippery
slope here in this country and just thank you for your
testimony. I yield back.
Chair Jordan. The gentlelady yields back.
The gentlelady from Florida is recognized.
Ms. Lee. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Welcome to your witnesses. Today we are here to discuss
censorship. One of the most alarming fronts in the battle
against censorship is the Left's early attempts to control and
to over-regulate artificial intelligence.
Instead of fostering innovation and ensuring AI serves the
American people, Democrats have rushed to impose sweeping
limitations and restrictions, restrictions that have silenced
voices, that have distorted facts, and that have the potential
to undermine our competitiveness in the global stage. There is
growing evidence that artificial intelligence chatbots and
models refuse to answer certain questions or can give skewed
responses based on political bias.
The Biden Administration and blue States pushed heavy-
handed regulations with an approach that wasn't protecting
Americans from real harm like China's AI-driven propaganda or
deep fake fraud. Instead, it was about controlling speech. Some
proposals even suggested that AI-generated content should be
pre-approved by the government. That is not guard rails; that
is a Ministry of Truth.
America leads the world in technology because we champion
free thought, open debate, and competition. If we over-regulate
AI and stifle free speech, we won't just lose those values; we
lose our technological edge to Nations who do not share our
commitment to freedom.
Mr. Taibbi, I would like to start with you. Do you think AI
censorship has the potential to be more insidious than social
media censorship because it is baked into underlying algorithms
making it harder to detect by the average user once it is
there?
Mr. Taibbi. Congresswoman, thank you for the question. I
absolutely do think that. In fact, that was a critical reason I
think that a lot of us were alarmed when we worked on the
Twitter Files. We were very fortunate thanks to the freak
accident of an over-caffeinated billionaire deciding to dump
all the stuff into the public. We got access to all these
emails showing the decision processes that led to all these
different people being flagged or censored or removed, on the
Left and the Right, frankly.
AI with that technology there's the possibility that there
wouldn't be no trace of anything. You could just give it some
general guidelines and the entire process could be automated,
and it wouldn't leave that kind of a trace for us to sift
through later on.
That's why I think there was a significant alarm, from what
I understand talking to sources in Silicon Valley last spring,
that after having some discussions with the Biden
Administration about their plans for AI going forward. That was
one of the reasons why there was a sudden shift in the
donations from Silicon Valley from one party to the other.
Ms. Lee. If AI models are programmed to reinforce one
political perspective while shutting down another, what impact
do you think that will have on the public discourse, most
especially for our young people who are receiving a significant
amount of information from chatbots and artificial
intelligence?
Mr. Taibbi. Well, it's very scary because one of the things
that we found again in the Twitter Files is we were asking
ourselves the question, well, how are they doing this, how are
they picking which topics to look at or which posts to look at?
Ultimately, we figured out that essentially they were
prechoosing narratives and then looking for posts that fell
into the bucket of things that might constitute violations.
For instance, things that might have promoted vaccine
hesitancy. Even if was true information. Even if it was
somebody who took the shot and died for an unrelated reason, or
somebody who had an unpleasant experience getting vaccinated,
that would fall into the bucket of something that would promote
hesitancy. AI would be far faster of doing the work of
identifying narratives and identifying posts that fall into
those narratives.
Now, the thing that's offensive about this to me as a
journalist, again, is that this has nothing to do with the
accuracy of the underlying material. It's the narratives that
are important in this entire world. That's what's scary.
Mr. Lee. What can Congress do, or perhaps more importantly
should Congress not do to help support an information ecosystem
that is fair, open, and unbiased?
Mr. Taibbi. It's more in the direction of what they
shouldn't do. Shouldn't get involved. The nightmare scenario is
what we're already seeing play out in Europe with the Digital
Services Act where you have this gigantic sort of retinue of
what they call trusted flaggers going through information and
constantly deciding which narratives are acceptable, which ones
aren't. That's what we can't have. We cannot allow that to
exist either formally or informally, which is what we saw
already happening.
Ms. Lee. Thank you.
Mr. Chair, I yield back.
Chair Jordan. The gentlelady yields back.
The gentleman from Illinois is recognized.
Mr. Garcia. Thank you, Mr. Chair and the Ranking Member.
To the witnesses here today, as my colleagues have said the
free press has played a fundamentally important role throughout
American history. Investigative journalists have exposed
corruption, exploitation, discrimination, and yes, government
lies. So, for all those reasons I am a little surprised that my
colleagues from across the aisle, my Republican colleagues
would have chosen to revisit this topic.
After all, it draws attention to the fact that shadow
President Musk, who is currently serving as a, quote, ``Special
Government Employee,'' is also using a social media platform
that he owns and controls to circulate deceitful propaganda on
behalf of the regime that he serves.
Mr. Aaron, let me ask you a few questions. How do lies
coming from someone designated as a government employee damage
the flow of accurate information to the American people?
Mr. Aaron. Well, the American people have an expectation
that their leaders should be doing everything they can to tell
them the truth. So, obviously, if they're being fed falsehoods,
that's a huge problem and it creates obviously greater distrust
in government and often obviously leads to things that
government leaders don't want the public to know about.
Mr. Garcia. Have you seen those types of falsehoods on
exhibit since the President Trump was inaugurated?
Mr. Aaron. Well, I imagine there's a long history in the
government of some people not telling the truth. Certainly,
President Trump has very often misled people, lied, relied on
falsehoods, exaggerations and the like. Yes, I think it's very
concerning.
Mr. Garcia. What does it mean for a democracy when its
richest citizen is using both major social media platform that
he owns and his official status as a Special Government
Employee--what that title gives him to undermine the free
press?
Mr. Aaron. Well, I think that the American public has a lot
of people are questioning what power does that title give him?
Where are the limits on Elon Musk's power? What is he being
allowed to do and for him at the same time to be able to
control a powerful social media platform and dictate those
terms? It's one thing to be the leader of a media company; it's
another to be a leader of the government. When those two things
are combined, I think that is where we get into a very
troubling area.
Mr. Garcia. That is the ride that we are in right now. One
last followup, Mr. Aaron. Since shadow President Musk stood
next to President Trump to make the claim that, quote, ``all of
their actions are maximally transparent,'' when leaders use the
tactics you just described are they generally trying to be more
transparent or less transparent?
Mr. Aaron. Well, in my experience, Congressman, when
they're so loudly proclaiming how transparent they're being
while not sharing information that usually means people are
covering things up and don't want the public to know what
they're doing.
Mr. Garcia. Thank you very much.
Mr. Chair, I yield back.
Chair Jordan. The gentleman yields back.
The gentleman from Texas is recognized.
Mr. Nehls. Sir, I yield my time to the Chair.
Chair Jordan. I appreciate the gentleman yielding. Mr.
Taibbi, is censoring false speech, OK?
Mr. Taibbi. Mr. Chair, no, the government has no role--I
was--
Chair Jordan. Not supposed to censor false speech, not
supposed to censor wrong speech, not supposed to censor stupid
speech? Congress is guilty of doing stupid speech probably
every day. You are not supposed to do that because we have a
First Amendment and the answer to stupid, false, and wrong
speech is more speech. That is what the First Amendment is.
Mr. Taibbi. That's right.
Chair Jordan. Is that accurate?
Mr. Taibbi. Yes, it is.
Chair Jordan. It was particularly troubling in the last
administration that they censored so much speech that wasn't
false. That would have been bad; that would have been wrong.
That is a violation of the First Amendment. They censored so--
and you have referenced it multiple times, whether it was Dr.
Bhattacharya or Mr. Berenson, a journalist for The New York
Times, things they said about COVID that actually turned out to
be true. That was censored.
Mr. Taibbi. Right, that was censored. Then, the most
dangerous misinformation of all almost always comes from the
government. Under the previous administration and possibly even
this one, who knows, but the Biden Administration was
consistently wrong about--in its COVID messaging.
Chair Jordan. They were wrong about everything. They told
us that it didn't come from the lab. Surely looks like it did.
A number of government agencies that they think are--got all
the smartest bureaucrats in the world say it came from the lab,
I think including the FBI, for goodness sakes. We have had a
lot of problems with--but they said it wasn't our tax dollars
used at the lab. Yes, it was. They said it wasn't gain of
function research done at the lab. Yes, it was. They said the
vaccinated couldn't get it. Yes, they could. They said the
vaccinated couldn't transmit. Yes, they could. They said mask
work. No, they didn't. Then, they said the six-feet social
distancing was based on science.
Dr. Fauci said in the deposition. I was there, and he said
it--they kind of made it up. Wasn't based on science. I think
that they were oh for eight. That's exactly the stuff, if you
disagree with any of those eight positions, that is what they
attack. So, it wasn't like false speech, which is bad enough.
It was actually accurate stuff.
You don't have to take my word for it. Mr. Zuckerberg wrote
the Committee a letter and said it was those kind of things
relative to COVID that the Biden Administration day after day
pressured them to censor. That is scary.
Here is the thing we forgot, and I don't think this has
come up in the hearing. Yes, we have been at this, what, 3\1/2\
hours. That administration actually tried to set up a
commission to police speech. It was called the Disinformation
Governance Board. As if a bunch of other bureaucrats could
further tell us, no, you can't say that. They were going to do
it. What was her name? Ms. Jankowitz. Jankowitz was going to
lead this thing. You are like, what?
So, Ms. Subramanya, we were pretty close to being as bad as
all the other countries you have talked about, and frankly your
country Canada. We were right there but for the work of folks
like you and others highlighting this. I will let you finish up
and talk about just how dangerously close the United States
with the Constitution, with the Bill of Rights, with the First
Amendment, with free speech how close we were to having a
Disinformation Governance Board, for goodness sakes.
Ms. Subramanya. Absolutely. Here was an unelected
bureaucrat who was going to tell you what the truth was. She
was going to be the arbiter of the truth. The United States
came pretty close to the kind of situation that you see in
Canada.
I just want to say a quick thing about billionaires.
Billionaires have come up in the conversation here quite a bit.
I don't recall anyone objecting to George Soros. I don't recall
anyone objecting to Bill Gates. All these people were meeting
politicians on the other side of the aisle and setting the
agenda behind closed doors. What's different now, in my
opinion, is the fact that we have transparency. It's only been
a few weeks, but the fact of the matter is that Musk tweets--
posts everything online. President Trump has been extremely
transparent about what he's campaigned on and he's carrying out
that agenda. I welcome the transparency. It's still early days.
This administration should be criticized if they're crossing a
line and where the First Amendment rights are under threat. The
transparency which we see right now is very welcomed. I just
find that the hypocrisy of picking on one billionaire and
leaving out the rest is a little jarring.
Chair Jordan. Yes. He is maybe--you talk about
transparency. He is certainly willing to answer the press'
questions, probably more than any president we--certainly more
than the last one. Certainly, more than the last one.
I yield back to the gentleman from Texas and thank you for
yielding.
Mr. Nehls. Mr. Chair, I yield back.
Chair Jordan. The gentleman yields back.
The gentlelady from California is recognized.
Ms. Kamlager-Dove. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you,
Ranking Member.
I appreciate the witnesses for being here today. I just
want to break some things down for us laypeople. So, Mr. Taibbi
first. Would you agree that Congress is part of the government?
Mr. Taibbi. Yes.
Ms. Kamlager-Dove. OK. Thank you.
Mr. Taibbi. Well, at the Executive--
Ms. Kamlager-Dove. Mr. Aaron--thank you. Mr. Aaron, would
you agree that the President, the Executive Branch is part of
the government, yes or no?
Mr. Aaron. I would agree.
Ms. Kamlager-Dove. OK. Yes, the President is the
government. OK, so now I would like to talk about what is a
public figure.
It is a person who has achieved fame, prominence, or
notoriety through achievement, luck, action, or in some cases
through no purposeful action of their own.
So, Members of Congress, many journalists, and some of you
here are public figures. Yes, the President of these United
States, by virtue of the position is a public figure.
As a public figure, under well-established law, there is a
higher threshold for defamation. You have to prove actual
purposeful malice, because as a public figure, you are open to
criticism. We all are.
So, what is censorship? It is when the government dictates
what you can and cannot say. Essentially tells you to shut up.
It is the equivalent of a very loud, Ssshhh.
What happens when you don't Ssshhh, when you express
yourself, when you share an opinion that doesn't square with
someone's idea of truth, or that they feel hurts them. Well,
hello, defamation. It is lawsuit time.
If you defame someone, they can sue you. If you win, you
can seek things like monetary damages, money, an injunction
precluding you from doing what you did again in the future, or
a retraction. You had better say sorry, my bad.
The ultimate result is to shut someone up and to make
others rethink speaking up. Now, I don't think you all want to
be told to shut up, or do you?
You want to be made to shut up? I don't think so, because
that is censorship. Dictating, defining what someone can or
cannot say.
So, since 2016, this President, now the government, has
sued the Washington Post for defamation seeking $3.78 billion
in damages over something about porn and banking. He has sued
ABC News for defamation, and they agreed to pay him millions of
dollars and say, sorry.
He sued a local Wisconsin TV station for defamation over a
campaign ad. Talk about thin skin. Sued CBS News for a
deceptive, false, or misleading act in commerce, seeking $10
billion over an interview.
Then, Meta got sued for the opposite, for actually taking
down Trump's account after January 6th. When January 6th did
happen, people killed a Member of the Capitol Police. There
were cop killers in that bunch who got pardoned.
I digress. Meta agreed to pay $25 million, having some of
the money go to the Presidential library, Trump's friend got
hired, they said, no more fact checking.
So, in my hood, that is what somebody would call a
shakedown. Then, sued CNN for defamation. (1) Allegedly
comparing Trump to Hitler, and (2) describing Trump's false
claims that he won the 2020 elections.
So, lots of defamation lawsuits from Trump, a lot of
chilling effect, intimidation, silencing, and fear. If the
government can come after CNN and Meta, then surely the
government can come after any American that says something the
government, this President, doesn't like.
So, I was struck by the CNN defamation lawsuit, because
Trump sued them for the use of the phrase, the big lie, in
connection with his 2020 election loss challenge.
Fox News, arguably the largest media outlet in the country,
called Arizona in the 2020 election for Biden. Trump didn't sue
Fox. Same story, very different treatment from the President.
Then, there is Hitler. So, a CNN correspondent allegedly
compared Trump to Hitler. Then, J.D. Vance, a public figure who
wrote a book that became a movie, who was on the circuit
promoting the book, texted a former Yale roommate, actually
calling Trump America's Hitler.
This America's Hitler text was shared in news outlets
around the country. Only CNN gets sued and J.D. Vance gets
picked as Trump's Vice President.
Such duplicity and a profound abuse of the laws of
defamation, because it is not really about defamation. It is
about censorship by this President, supported by this
Republican government.
I could not find a single President in the history of this
country who sued someone or an organization for defamation. Nor
could I find a single President who tried to lower the bar for
defamation lawsuits against the media.
Note, true statements and expressions of opinion are
inherently not defamatory. I yield back.
Chair Jordan. The gentlelady yields back. The gentlelady
from Wyoming is recognized.
Ms. Hageman. This Committee has worked tirelessly over the
past two years to expose the censorship industrial complex, and
how censorship has permeated so many of our once trusted
institutions.
We have confirmed, for example, that the Biden
Administration pressured and coerced Facebook/Meta and other
social media companies to remove true and accurate content,
including the fact that the Hunter Biden laptop, in all its
horrific glory, did in fact, belong to him, and was an honest
depiction of not only his life, but of his corruption.
We exposed the World Federation of Advertisers, or WFA, and
its evil spawn, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, or
GARM, as being in reality, a trillion-dollar antitrust
operation designed to prevent conservative media from
generating revenue through advertising sales.
We informed the public that their government, a government
that they pay for, was using third parties to prevent them from
obtaining accurate information about COVID-19 and the efficacy
of the vaccines.
We exposed the long-term effort by our so-called political
betters to censor our speech, to prevent us from freely
exercising our religion, to prohibit us from assembling
peaceably, to destroy freedom of the press, and to block our
ability to petition our government for redress, the five
pillars of the First Amendment to the United States
Constitution.
To say that what we learned is frightful and frightening is
an understatement. It is the absolute antithesis of a free
society.
If we cannot speak the truth to power, we have no power. If
the government can block the dissemination of valid,
legitimate, and accurate information about our very healthcare,
then we are serfs, not free people.
If the entire mainstream media complex is turned into a
government mouthpiece, corruption becomes the order of the day.
Freedom, equal protection, the rule of law, and accountability
mean nothing.
There were numerous people who helped expose the scandal,
including several on this panel today, and the American people
thank you. Your willingness to take on the censorship
industrial complex is admirable, and it is not hyperbole to say
that you had a hand in saving our republic.
We also learned that this censorship apparatus was not
limited to just a few Federal employees, but was a whole of
government approach that was launched to protect the Bidens,
Fauci, Mayorkas, and others while targeting Trump's supporters
and the disfavored.
Here we are, the dust has largely settled, and we have
wrested control away from would be dictators, pulled back the
curtains and turned the sunlight on to disinfect the dark, dank
corners of Washington, DC.
Yet, I am not aware of anyone who created this censorship
infrastructure being held accountable for the last almost 10
years of relentless, well-funded, and well-orchestrated
attempts to nullify the First Amendment.
Here is my question. Are any of you aware of any political
leader or Federal employee being held accountable either by
being reprimanded or fired, being sued, or having criminal
charges brought against them, for violating Americans' First
Amendment rights?
Mr. Shellenberger?
Mr. Shellenberger. The only person I can think of is Nina
Jankowitz, who was basically forced to step down after--
Ms. Hageman. She didn't get a job.
Mr. Shellenberger. What is that?
Ms. Hageman. She didn't get the job.
Mr. Shellenberger. Yes, she just didn't get the job.
Ms. Hageman. Mr. Taibbi, are you aware of anybody being
punished?
Mr. Taibbi. No. I can't think of anybody.
Ms. Hageman. Mr. Aaron?
Mr. Aaron. Based on your description, I don't know.
Ms. Hageman. Ms. Subramanya?
Ms. Subramanya. I am not aware of any politician anywhere
on the planet, anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, who has been
held to account for violating people's free speech rights.
Ms. Hageman. So, don't you find it strange that the
architects of this situation have not been held accountable for
violating our rights?
On his first day in office, President Trump issued an
Executive Order prohibiting Federal officials from engaging in
censorship and directing reviews of previous Federal
involvement in censorship. That is a good first step.
I don't think it is enough. I believe that Congress must
act to defend the First Amendment, which is why I developed
legislation with Representative Dan Bishop, last Congress, now
introduced in this Congress, as the First Amendment
Accountability Act, which aligns with the President's Executive
Order, but it has actual teeth in it.
What my Accountability Act says, that it creates a Federal
version of 42 U.S.C. 1983, a civil rights statute, and it says,
that should a Federal employee deprive any person of their
First Amendment rights, the employee shall be held liable to
that person for damages, a suit in equity, or other proper
proceeding for redress, including the award of attorney's fees.
Mr. Raskin. Would the gentlelady yield for a friendly
question?
Ms. Hageman. No, I will not. Mr. Aaron--
Mr. Raskin. For a friendly question?
Ms. Hageman. No. Mr. Aaron, do you believe that an
individual employed by President Trump and the White House
should be able to violate your First Amendment rights to censor
your speech, yes or no?
Mr. Aaron. No. I don't think you should be censored.
Ms. Hageman. So, I take it that you support my First
Amendment Accountability Act, to make sure that such an action
never happens. If it did, that you would have a remedy to
protect yourself. Is that right?
Mr. Aaron. I would be happy to look at the legislation and
the text you have prepared.
Ms. Hageman. As to each of the rest of you, Mr. Taibbi, Mr.
Shellenberger, and Ms. Subramanya, do you believe that the
First Amendment Accountability Act is a good idea?
Mr. Taibbi. I do.
Mr. Shellenberger. It sounds good to me, but I would love
to read it.
Ms. Subramanya. I support it.
Ms. Hageman. Thank you. I yield back.
Chair Jordan. Just as importantly, the Chair and the
Ranking Member support the legislation. It is a good bill.
With that, we yield to the gentleman, his first Full
Committee hearing, the gentleman from Florida is recognized.
Mr. Moskowitz. Thank you, Mr. Chair. When I got to
Congress, I wanted to be on the Judiciary Committee. I was
placed in purgatory with Comer. I was worried about all the
stuff that I was going to be missing in Judiciary.
Chair Jordan started today, the hearing, he said, ``what a
difference four years makes.'' Well, apparently not, because
today is Groundhog Day.
So, I just want to thank the Chair. He knew I had FOMO
missing out on all these hearings. So, I brought pictures of
the Chair doing this hearing.
So, here is one picture from March 9, 2023, he did this
hearing. Then, on March 30th, he did the hearing again, in
2023.
Chair Jordan. A different tie. A different tie.
Mr. Moskowitz. Oh, we will get there. We will get there,
Mr. Chair. Here is one from July 20th, doing the same hearing.
On November 30th, the same hearing. OK, February 6th, the
same hearing. There are so many more. On April 11th, identical
hearing. Finally, May 1st, the same hearing.
So, by the way, anyone keeping score, a Chair wore a red
tie at four of those hearings, a yellow tie three times. Today
at the eighth hearing, we are even now, today is yellow tie
day.
So, four yellow ties, four red ties. I tried to match you,
Mr. Chair, but mine is a little more gold. I will work on the
hue. It is the golden age. Ah-ha, the golden age.
At least I now know what to get the Chair--
Chair Jordan. Does the gentleman yield?
Mr. Moskowitz. For Christmas. Well, I will yield in a
second.
Chair Jordan. OK.
Mr. Moskowitz. Mr. Chair, don't let Comer out-Comer you.
James is out there Comering around with new falsehoods, and we
are doing a hearing that we have done eight times.
If you need some ideas, we've got some. I feel bad for the
Ranking Member. Ranking Member Raskin came all the way over
here from Oversight. We had a vote. In fact, several of us came
over here from Oversight.
So, if you need some ideas from us, we will gladly assist.
Look, we are doing free speech, OK? So, since we are doing free
speech and censorship, I want to talk about a former friend of
this Committee and winner of Nazi of the Month Club, Kanye
West.
While there are no eggs on the shelf, there is definitely
egg on your face. Last week, there were an endless, endless
amounts of Nazi tweets by Kanye West. I am going to read some
of them.
I love Hitler. I am a Nazi. The Jews were better as slaves.
Hitler was so fresh. I can say Hitler as much as I want. It
went on for days.
If that was not enough, he ran a commercial during the
Super Bowl, directing people to his website. The only thing the
website was selling was a shirt with a swastika.
So, the marketplace of ideas. They say oh Jared, but it is
the marketplace of ideas. Well, as we mainstream Nazis, what
happens when Nazism becomes the marketplace?
The Chair said he is worried about Europe. Maybe we should
go to Europe. While we are there, maybe we should go to
Auschwitz to see what happens when you mainstream Nazis.
Mr. Shellenberger would say, but Jared, free speech is
absolute. Don't be a censor. Actually Kanye accidentally
disproved that idea. He proved that free speech is not
absolute.
You see, what happened, was he started posting porn on X.
Then, all of a sudden, the conservative free speech masters of
the universe were outraged. Elon unfollowed him and then
labeled Kanye's account.
So, imagine if Kanye had only posted Nazi porn. Well, Mr.
Shellenberger and other conservatives would be saying, well,
the Nazi party is OK, as long as they keep their clothes on.
So, remember, if you are a Nazi, just keep your SS uniform
on. Don't take it off, because that is when we are going to get
the censorship.
This is a hearing about free speech. My colleague from
Texas said nobody blamed Biden for the cost of eggs. He has
every right to say it, because it is free speech.
That is total bullshit. OK. Look, all my colleagues are
blaming Biden for eggs. Former President, now President Trump
blamed him on October 26th, before the election, blaming him
for the price of eggs.
So, let's get some grit. Now, Mr. Chair, I will yield to
you.
Chair Jordan. Well, I was just going to ask a question. We
could ask our witness, but I will ask you, since this is your
time.
If you are going to have eight hearings on something, I
can't think of something much better than protecting the
fundamental liberty that makes this, as Ms. Subramanya said
last Congress, that is the hallmark of Western civilization,
the ability to debate and protect the most fundamental right we
have.
All the other rights in the First Amendment do not mean
squat if you can't talk. That is what we are defending.
So, we should have maybe had nine or ten hearings, because
this, the First Amendment and free speech are so darn
important. I would just maybe ask Mr. Shellenberger, Mr.
Taibbi, and Ms. Subramanya, do you think we could have more
hearings on something this important?
Mr. Shellenberger. Well, first Congressman, thank you for
your advocacy for UAP disclosure. I am glad that we agree on
that one. I am right there with you on that all the way.
I am with the Supreme Court on this issue of Nazism. Aren't
you? Do you disagree with the Brandenburg decision?
Mr. Moskowitz. So, the answer--
Mr. Shellenberger. The Skokie ruling?
Mr. Moskowitz. Reclaiming my time, I know we are over Mr.
Chair. So, I will land the plane for you.
What you are describing is a time when two or three, or a
dozen Nazis could march in a neighborhood. Things have changed
dramatically when a Nazi with 30, 40, or 50 million followers
can buildup a whole platform behind being a Nazi.
You don't have to listen to me, look at the data. With what
is going on with antisemitism in Europe and in this country.
That is not happening because 20 Nazis marched in a community.
It is happening because we are allowing it to proliferate on an
online platform.
So, I would say, Mr. Chair, you are right. Freedom of
speech is super important. You guys won the election. I have
never seen a team win the game and then go out and be like, the
refs, the refs, the refs.
You guys won. It is over. We lost. Biden is back in the
basement where you say he lives. We are good.
Mr. Shellenberger. Congressman, do you really think that
the founders meant for a new media technology like radio or
telegraphs to change the First Amendment?
Did they write the First Amendment and say, well, but if a
future technology comes along like the telegraph, or the
television, the radio, then we are going to go ahead and get
rid of the First Amendment?
Mr. Moskowitz. No. We are not getting rid of it.
Mr. Shellenberger. So, why change it?
Chair Jordan. The time for the gentleman has expired. We
have others that are waiting.
Mr. Shellenberger. I am looking forward to more talks
later.
Chair Jordan. Yes. The gentleman from Texas is recognized
for five minutes.
Mr. Hunt. Thank you. In 2020, what you were viewing on
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, was not an organic newsfeed.
It was a State-approved newsfeed curated by the Biden-Harris
Administration.
This might sound familiar. This newsfeed is brought to you
by Pfizer. This newsfeed is brought to you by the Biden-Harris
Administration.
This newsfeed is brought to you by the big Russia lie. We
know it is true, because 51 intelligence officers said it was.
Right? Wrong.
The Republicans, conservatives, and America First Patriots
en-
dured years of gaslighting, censoring, democratization,
suspension, debanking, collusion to deplatform, and every
restriction of free speech imaginable, all under the Biden-
Harris Administration.
In the past seven years, we have witnessed the greatest
assault on the First Amendment in American history. Remember,
the Democrats are the party of preserving democracy. Right?
We expected this type of censorship from the Biden-Harris
Administration. What we didn't know, was how coordinated their
efforts were with big tech companies like Meta, Amazon, and
Twitter.
What I want to talk about today are the groups responsible
for this censorship. Now, Twitter has been saved thanks to Elon
Musk, but Meta remains in the hands of the very people who
worked with the Biden Administration to silence our voices.
I know that Meta recently changed their policies concerning
censorship and free speech, but who is to say that those
changes will be permanent?
Let's talk about Meta's political content figure, which
magically disappeared on the new Trump Administration. Will
this political content filter magically reappear if the
Democrats take back the White House at some point in the very
distant future?
Will voices like mine and many of my colleagues in this
room be suppressed ahead of the midterms? These are all
questions that inquiring minds really want to know.
Now, you might have noticed that recently Mark Zuckerberg
has been on a press tour to repair his procensorship image.
Those of us who have been subject to censorship, especially
this U.S. Congressman, I don't forgive and I don't forget quite
so easily.
Let's not forget that Meta banned the sitting President of
these United States of America from Instagram and Facebook.
Interestingly enough, Meta banded President Trump before Biden
even took office.
So, you cannot defecate on the President's First Amendment
rights and call it chocolate pudding at this point. Just
because you give a million--
Mr. Raskin. Would the gentleman yield?
Mr. Hunt. Dollars ex post facto, does not change the fact
that you did this, and this actually happened.
I have seen Democrats on TV for the past week scream, Elon
Musk, Elon Musk, Musk, Musk, Musk, Musk, Musk, Musk. It has
been quite invigorating, actually. I have really enjoyed it.
What is funny about it to me, is that you are mad at the
guy that found the fraud, but not mad at the people that wasted
your money. Here in Congress, we clearly can't cut a budget.
So, I really thank Elon for doing our job for us.
Mr. Shellenberger, thank you for being here, sir. As a
leading expert in the suppression of freedom of speech, what is
the most egregious example of censorship from Meta that has
occurred during the Biden Administration, in your humble
opinion?
Mr. Shellenberger. Probably the censorship of what Facebook
itself called true stories of vaccine side effects. These are
ordinary moms and dads who are describing the impact of vaccine
on their kids.
They were censored without their knowledge. Against the
opinion of Facebook's own executives who said, if you want to
increase vaccine hesitancy, there is no better way to do it
than to censor people that are trying to share those stories.
That is the most fundamental kind of conversation that we
should be allowed to have between ordinary folks. Facebook
secretly censored it at the behest of the Biden Administration.
Mr. Hunt. Do you see a return to some of the policies that
I was referring to, with Meta, in terms of the upcoming
election, the upcoming midterms, the future?
I understand right now it is really cool because President
Trump won. So, now you want to be in the Cool Guy Club.
What measures do you think need to be done, or do you see a
potential return to that if we don't get this right in the next
18 months?
Mr. Shellenberger. I think yes, absolutely. I think
Zuckerberg, his statements were amazing recently. Of course, he
had made similar statements including defending Holocaust
denial on Facebook.
In 2019, he went back on that. As you mentioned, he deplat-
formed the President. So, not super reliable, so I do worry
about that.
The most important thing for Congress to do is to find
every penny that is going to censorship activities in the
Federal Government, phase them out. Then, some investigation to
hold the Right people accountable.
Because, I am with you, I was censored on Facebook for
sharing true information as well. I won't easily forget it.
Mr. Hunt. Thank you very much. I yield back the remainder
of my time. Thank you, sir.
Chair Jordan. The gentleman yields back. The Mayor of New
York, the gentleman from New York is recognized.
Mr. Goldman. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Of the eight hearings on
this topic, I do give you credit, this is only the third one
with these same witnesses.
This one though introduces a new wrinkle, censorship by
foreign countries. Of course, which Congress has no
jurisdiction over.
So, I do give you some credit because at least the first
two with them had something to do with our jurisdiction.
Chair Jordan. Does the gentleman yield?
Mr. Goldman. Not yet.
Chair Jordan. OK.
Mr. Goldman. Now, let's look at what has happened over the
past three weeks. Donald Trump pardoned more than 1,500
criminals from January 6th, including hundreds who were
convicted of assaulting police officers. So, much for backing
the blue.
He tried to freeze all Federal funding, SNAP benefits,
Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, tax refund checks, you
name it. Illegally fired senior officials and Inspector
Generals, and even the Director of the Office of Government
Ethics, because they might, God forbid, provide accountability
to the convicted felon in the White House.
The President has given an unelected billionaire total
access to the inner workings of every Executive Branch agency.
He is freely terminating government contracts and government
officials.
Now, whether you agree or not, with whatever Donald Trump
and Elon Musk are doing, it is a breathtaking and unprecedented
usurpation of government power.
Instead of Congress actually using its oversight authority
to provide a check and balance on this government takeover, the
Republican majority is once again here talking about Hunter
Biden's laptop, the Twitter files from many years ago, and now
a new one, censorship in Europe.
Now, when asked about what guardrails there may be on Elon
Musk's infiltration of our Federal Government this past
weekend, the Chair said, and I quote, ``The guardrails are all
you all in the press who are talking about it every day.''
The press? The press? What about Congress, Mr. Chair? Our
Constitution places responsibility for oversight and
accountability on Congress, not the press.
It is almost as if my colleagues on the other side of the
aisle wake up in the morning and think, how can I undermine my
own power?
Let's be very clear, nobody has any idea what Elon Musk is
doing, including the President, including my friend from Texas,
who has no idea whether Elon Musk has found fraud or not. I
find it shocking that my Republican colleagues are willing to
simply take Elon's word for it.
Just yesterday, Mr. Musk admitted that at least some of
what he says is incorrect. So, even Elon Musk does not take his
own word for it.
Now, how about this Committee investigate Elon Musk's
rampant conflict of interest, Mr. Chair? He has six companies
that have at least $13 billion of government contracts, and
here he is making decisions about what government contracts
should be canceled.
I want to introduce by unanimous consent, an article in The
New York Times from yesterday that talks about the 32 ongoing
investigations into Elon Musk and his companies.
This article outlines how Trump and Musk have fired
officials in 11 Federal agencies that are leading
investigations or enforcement matters or lawsuits pending
against Elon Musk. Now, all the investigations have stalled.
Lucky, Mr. Musk, can't be--
Chair Jordan. Objection.
Mr. Goldman. A conflict of interest.
Chair Jordan. Objection. Continue.
Mr. Goldman. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has
received hundreds of complaints against Tesla. Last week, after
Elon Musk gutted that agency that protects everyday Americans
against corporate greed, Mr. Musk Tweeted CFPB R.I.P.
Now, these are clear conflicts of interest. It is clearly
within the jurisdiction of this Committee to investigate, with
our oversight power, the conflicts of interest.
You know what the White House's response is? Let the guy
with the conflicts decide if he has conflicts. Just yesterday,
Mr. Musk announced that he canceled 89 government contracts
worth $881 million in the Department of Education. That is
money Congress appropriated.
We have the power of the purse. Maybe it is wasteful, maybe
it is not. I have no idea. You have no idea. It is a blatant
violation of the law and the Constitution.
Apparently, my Republican colleagues are so weak and afraid
of Donald Trump and Elon Musk that they are willing to
undermine their own Constitutional authority just to please
them. You are giving away your own power in fealty to Donald
Trump.
So, Mr. Chair, I ask that for our next hearing, we actually
do some oversight and accountability of what this
Administration is doing right now, not what the Biden
Administration did years ago.
I yield back.
Chair Jordan. The gentleman yields back. I would just ask
Mr. Shellenberger, if European law results in the censorship of
Americans, is that something that the Judiciary Committee
should be concerned about?
Mr. Shellenberger. Yes, absolutely. You shared that
information this morning on X, the post about the judicial
ruling in Europe, which says that they do think they have the
right to do that.
We keep seeing this similarly in Australia where you see
these authorities who think that they should be able to censor
the entire global internet of disfavored information.
So, it is very disturbing, and like I said, it really makes
you question our alliance with Europe.
Mr. Moskowitz. Mr. Chair, I have an unanimous consent
motion.
Chair Jordan. The gentleman is recognized.
Mr. Moskowitz. I asked to introduce by unanimous consent, a
letter from seven Members of Congress, including myself, to
Inspector General Michael Horowitz of the DOJ, asking him to
investigate egregious conflicts of interest of acting Deputy
Attorney General Emil Bove, and acting United States Attorney
for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin.
Chairman Jordan. You are asking interim to a record, a
letter you sent to who?
Mr. Moskowitz. To the Department of Justice Inspector
General Michael Horowitz, one of the very few who was not
fired.
Chair Jordan. Without objection. All right, that is fine.
The gentleman from North Carolina is recognized for five
minutes.
Mr. Knott. Thank you, Mr. Chair. To the Committees who have
been here for a marathon hearing, there has been a lot of talk
about how many of these we have had. This is my first one.
I have been very appreciative about what I have heard from
the role that each of you have played in uncovering what is a
truly horrific episode of censorship. I saw it as a private
citizen.
Unfortunately, I was not here to help uncover and to fight
back against the censorship over the last 3-5 years.
Nonetheless, I am deeply grateful to this Committee and to all
of you for your past and continued efforts to protect the First
Amendment.
I must say that I am somewhat astounded that there has not
been one colleague on the other side of the aisle that has
brought themselves to acknowledge, much less criticize, the
very obvious and blatant efforts of the Biden Administration to
suppress information in a very, very problematic anti-First
Amendment and, I would argue, illegal way.
Part of this has been admitted by those who were censored.
It has been admitted by those who are in the private industry
who were bullied into removing content. I want to talk more
about what is going on right now.
Mr. Shellenberger, I want to start with you. You mentioned
that you are still within the crosshairs of the censorship
industrial complex, and it is a wide variety of actors, agency
contractors, private companies, even universities and so forth.
What is the end goal of this censorship that we are seeing,
not just here in the United States, but also in places like
Brazil, where you are being investigated?
Mr. Shellenberger. Yes, thank you. Well, yes, thank you for
asking that question. It is interesting to hear a lot of
concerns about who gets to be in the limited space in the
defense department.
By the way, Huffington Post is a Left-wing magazine I got
in, and Rupa works for a centrist magazine that is in there. It
is just not a censorship issue or changing the website, that is
pretty ridiculous.
I am actually in an under criminal investigation in Brazil
for expressing true facts on X. That is actually happening
right now.
Similarly, we see in Europe very serious penalties for
people that supposedly commit the act of misinformation. Then,
in Canada, there is actually life imprisonment as a potential
punishment for misinformation.
Mr. Knott. What is the end of these laws and these efforts?
Is it total political power? Is it just the easy eradication of
dissent? What is the goal?
Mr. Shellenberger. Total information control is definitely
the goal. They want to control the information and also shape
how people understand it. That is why they talk about narrative
control.
Then, the other part of it is, they want to scare people.
They just want people to be afraid to say things online.
Mr. Knott. So, that they can remain in power.
Mr. Shellenberger. Absolutely. You see some of it just in
the vanity of politicians demanding that posts about themselves
be taken down. Obviously, that is important for their political
careers.
That is why in Brazil, they have actually banned whole
politicians from being online.
Mr. Knott. In your estimation, we have obviously heard
about information that has been taken down and forcefully
removed. The narrative control also, it brings to mind
narratives that are written and pushed into the public sphere.
One thing that is of concern to me is whether it was the
Russian collusion narrative, the Russian dossier, the Biden
laptop scandal, trying to discredit what seemed to be a very
obvious verified piece of evidence.
Questioning Biden's role in enriching himself, that was
made out of bounds. Questions about the vaccine, we all are
familiar with those. The vaccine's effectiveness, the effect of
the vaccine.
Looking at the news media, is there a part of this that, or
I would submit to you, where the narrative is pushed into
various outlets to further the censors' objectives?
Mr. Shellenberger. Well, yes. You see it right now, right?
Everybody is saying ``Constitutional crisis.'' If you just
Google that, it is like, all over. Everybody repeats themselves
in the mainstream news media.
We are in a new world now. We have more platforms that are
open. It is much harder to get away with lying as The New York
Times did last night when it claimed that there was no evidence
of fraud for Musk.
Mr. Knott. Yes.
Mr. Shellenberger. So, I do think it is a new environment.
That is why you have to keep the government from putting
pressure on these social media platforms, so they can continue
to let the conversation.
Mr. Knott. Just very briefly, is what is happening now with
Elon Musk, who is highlighting the waste, fraud, and abuse of
USAID and other expenditures, and what happened under the
Biden-Harris Administration with their censorship efforts, are
those two aligned?
Are they in any way synonymous with one another?
Mr. Shellenberger. Well, yes. In terms of things not
changing when we were here two years ago, Elon Musk was the big
devil because he was allowing free speech to proliferate on
what was then Twitter.
You hear it today. People get, we heard a lot of people get
up today and talk about how they support free speech, but we
have to stop all the racism and hate online.
Well, that is a call for censorship. Let's just be
perfectly clear. If you are calling for censorship of hatred
and racism or antisemitism online, you are calling for
censorship.
That is completely anathema to the American tradition, to
our Supreme Court rulings to Brandenburg and its reinforcement
in Skokie.
So, we have had a lot of technological revolutions with
different media sources. We had the, since 1776 and 1789,
telegraph, we had radio, we had television, and now we have the
internet.
Somehow, we have managed to keep our tradition of freedom
of speech and the First Amendment alive, despite those
technological revolutions. After which, every single time,
somebody was saying that, oh, everything has changed, and we
have to now amend or qualify the First Amendment.
Mr. Knott. May I close, there is one question to you, sir.
How is AI going to make it easier or more difficult to apply
censorship for political gain?
Mr. Shellenberger. That is for Matt, right?
Mr. Knott. Either or, yes.
Mr. Taibbi. AI would allow these companies to detect
narratives and enforce all these strictures with much greater
speed than we saw in the Twitter files.
The process that they are going through with the DSA, which
right now requires huge armies of people, or what they call
trusted flaggers, to go through information personally. They
can do that with AI, with almost no investment at all.
That is the terrifying part.
Mr. Knott. Thank you. I yield back.
Chair Jordan. The gentleman yields back.
I would ask unanimous consent to enter into the record,
maybe the first time I have ever entered into the record The
New York Times article, but this is from two years ago. It is,
``EU Law Sets the Stage for a Clash Over Misinformation.''
I just want to read one paragraph into the record here too.
The law of the Digital Services Act, which Mr. Taibbi just
referenced, is intended to force social media giants to adopt
new policies and practice to address accusations that they
routinely host, and through their algorithms popularized
corrosive content.
If the measure is successful, as officials and experts hope,
its effects could extend far beyond Europe, changing company
policies in the United States and elsewhere.
That is where they get the leverage and pressure on the
companies to censor Americans in Europe. They don't have it in
Brazil, but Mr. Shellenberger has felt it firsthand in Brazil.
That is why we are focused on this issue.
The gentlelady, Ms. Crockett, is recognized for five
minutes.
Ms. Crockett. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just in case I go over,
I just wanted to note that the previous speaker went over by a
minute.
We have heard a lot about the fact that Democrats have been
talking about Elon Musk. Let me give you a news alert, we are
not going to stop talking about him. We are going to keep
talking about him until he is out of here.
Now, if he wants to be elected or appointed and confirmed
to something, then so be it. As of right now, we have somebody
that for whatever reason, I don't know if you all just trying
to play in our face because you think we are stupid, or if you
literally just cannot see the difference in a George Soros and
a Bill Gates.
Let me give you a little bit of the difference. First
George Soros, nor Bill Gates never somehow decided to turn off
the spigot of money that was going through to various
organizations and agencies, to the extent that it had actually
been ordered by law that they should have access to it.
To the extent that people are dying. There are people that
have died as a result of this antic. There are now farmers that
are screaming that they may lose their family farms because we
have over $500 million worth of food that is sitting and not
going anywhere because of the attempt to shut down USAID.
So, let me tell you, that is the big difference between the
two of them. Let me also tell you, that a big difference
between Democrats and Republicans is that we don't just say we
believe in the Constitution, but we walk it like we talk it.
What does that mean? That means that if we believe in the
Constitution, we don't just pick out the Second Amendment and
say that it is limitless. Nor do we pick out the First
Amendment and say that it is limitless.
The thing about the Constitution is that it has always been
a balancing test. There are limits to this. Right now what we
continue to hear from a certain side of the aisle is that there
are no limits to this lawlessness.
In fact, there are limits. I can tell you that one of those
limits typically is around hate crimes. You may or may not know
that when it comes down to it, if somebody decides that they
want to send something hateful in the U.S. mail, they can
actually go to prison for that, up to five years in prison.
So, yes, there are always going to be limits. So, when we
start to talk about Trump and him being pulled down on any
platform, this just happened to be after he incited an
insurrection.
This just happened to be after in a bipartisan way this
particular chamber decided that they were going to impeach him.
So, there was something a little different about what he did,
because as we know, it led to people actually dying.
Let's talk about who is doing the nefarious things with the
tech giants, because I don't think that one side of the aisle
is promoting truth. Sometimes it may seem a little treasonous.
All right, so, we have this article right here about this
guy. Meta says it will end its fact checking program on social
media posts. I will talk about that a little bit later.
Then, we have, Washington Post says it will not endorse a
candidate for President. We also know that actually they
absolutely intended to endorse Kamala Harris.
We have this one, Google Maps now show Gulf of America
instead of Gulf of Mexico for app users in the United States,
which is a complete farce, because it is the Gulf of Mexico, it
always has been.
We know that the AP got kicked out yesterday because they
refused to buy into this lie. Because that is all you really
want to promote is lies. That is the big issue that we have.
Elon Musk boosted false USAID conspiracy theories to shut
down global aid. Now, while he was boosting those lies about
USAID, and he was stopping money going for say things such as
Head Start, somehow the only money that didn't stop with the
money to him and his organization.
Now, I don't know how you can have him be the watchdog as
well as the guy that is literally living off the government. If
we want to talk about government welfare, it looks like Elon
Musk, because it is my understanding that just yesterday, a new
contract was approved for approximately $300 million for Elon
Musk.
So, listen, I just want you all to be honest. You want to
sit here, you want to lie, because so often we hear, well, you
know, yes, we did lie. In fact, he admitted that he lied when
he was in the Oval Office yesterday.
If it is a lie that will get you into office, such as
saying, I know nothing about Project 2025, yet on day one, you
literally do everything that you can to implement it, including
making sure that you put, say, one of the main architects of
Project 2025 over the OMB, it is OK so long as you get the
power that you seek.
The problem is that the game is going to be on the American
people. When I say the American people, I mean all of us.
Unfortunately, I am also stuck in the Twilight Zone because of
the lies that were allowed to be propagated.
Just like when you are talking about vaccines and all this
nonsense, right now in my State of Texas, there is an outbreak
of measles. What they are finding is that because there has
been so much disinformation about vaccines that kids are sick
right now with measles that they did not have to have, if they
just trusted doctors and experts instead of randoms online.
So, I will end by saying this, Mr. Chair, because I know we
believe in Jesus in this chamber. In John 8:32, it says, ``the
truth shall set you free.'' So, maybe we should focus on a
little bit of truth in this chamber.
I will yield.
Chair Jordan. The gentlelady yields. The gentleman from
Wisconsin is recognized.
Mr. Grothman. Thank you very much. I would like to thank
the Chair for having this hearing. It might be the most
important hearing we have this session.
It is sad that we have had some of the Members on the other
side of the aisle talk about how this is a minor matter and we
should spend more time talking about bird flu. In any event,
thank you for having the hearing.
The public should again and again hear about the danger to
the First Amendment that is going on. I know when it comes to
election season, they poll stuff and they do insist spend more
time talking about the price of eggs than somebody trying to
take away the First Amendment.
Let's go, let's talk a little bit about some other
countries. So, we see where we may be headed. Mr.
Shellenberger, could you elaborate a little bit more about what
is going on in Brazil and how it affects this country?
Mr. Shellenberger. Sure. Brazil is, there is a lot of
lessons that are important from Brazil. The first is that it
makes you appreciate the First Amendment and that it was
written in such an unqualified way.
You may know Alexander Hamilton didn't think we needed a
First Amendment because it was redundant. We did it anyway
because the people that created this country really believed in
it.
In Brazil, the Constitution does not provide that level of
protection. There are too many qualifications. What you are
hearing from this side of the aisle today is that, oh, we have
got to qualify the First Amendment in all these ways.
The Supreme Court has made it very clear what those
qualifications are. So, you have got a Constitution that allows
for the Supreme Court to engage in just ridiculous levels of
censorship.
They have now banned some politicians from every single
social media platform. They have also sought to have frozen
people's bank accounts for things that they have done that
would have been considered a First Amendment right in the
United States.
As you see, they have targeted foreigners, like myself, for
publishing inconvenient information. So, yes, Brazil is a
warning for us about what can go wrong if you stop believing in
the essential importance of free speech.
Mr. Grothman. By the way, commenting on the last
questioner, is hateful speech free speech?
Mr. Shellenberger. No, absolutely not. That was inaccurate.
You can say hateful things. You can mail hateful things. What
the Congressperson was referring to, is that it is illegal to
threaten people, as it should be. Just like the line, it is
Brandenburg and Skokie is the immediate incitement to violence.
I agree with those Supreme Court rulings. You should not be
allowed to physically threaten somebody. Just like the Nazis,
if they, in Skokie, if they had said, OK, let's all go burn
that house down, that would have been illegal, that form of
speech.
That is pretty clear where the line is. Most high school
students, junior high school students could understand where
the distinction is.
Mr. Grothman. Well, they take that. It is not against the
law of hate.
Mr. Shellenberger. Of course. How could it be? It is
everybody has hatred in their heart.
Mr. Grothman. OK. Ms. Subramanya, could you elaborate on
what is going on in Canada? Most of our lifetime, we think of
Canada as almost being a cleaner version of the United States.
So, we can maybe learn some lessons as to what could happen
here from what has happened in Canada.
Ms. Subramanya. Well, what is happening in Canada right now
is that there is a political crisis. That is the only reason
why some of these very pernicious pieces of legislation are
just they have been, parliament is suspended. So, they have
died as a result.
There is nothing to stop a next government, a liberal
government, from bringing them back to life. What this suggests
to me is it is indicative of--
Mr. Grothman. Can you just give us some examples of things
you can't do in Canada today that we would be shocked if it
happened here? That they are trying to do.
Ms. Subramanya. For example, I can give you the example of
the truckers' protest in 2022, where peaceful protest was shut
down by the Prime Minister, by the government, by invoking the
Emergencies Act. Protesters were driven out of the city.
They could not protest government overreach. It was
government overreach that ultimately got them out. To make
matters worse, many of these people had their bank accounts
frozen.
This Chinese social credit system had finally come to
Canada. It was finally in the West. That has already happened.
Since then, there have been a series of attempts to pass
through legislation for, as I mentioned in my remarks, if you
are praising fossil fuels, for example, a private Member's bill
suggested that people should go to prison for that.
I mean, it is extraordinary.
Mr. Grothman. Right. We have to be on the ball here in
future elections, so that when politicians go down that route,
they are done. We will find another Democrat; we will find
another Republican.
Somebody who lives down that path is just perceived to be
beyond the pale.
Ms. Subramanya. Yes. No, I will tell you why this is
important. It is going back, it goes back to that question from
the Congressman, why are we having these hearings?
You need to have more of these hearings. There is a
stunning statistic from 2023, from the PEW Survey, 39 percent
of Americans in 2018 supported restrictions on false
information, what they think is false information or violent
content online. That number has gone up to 55 percent. That is
extraordinary.
So, these hearings are crucial to letting people know why
it is vital to have, to protect free speech and to defend the
First Amendment.
Mr. Grothman. To go over, in general, some of the things
that were done by the last administration. Thank you.
Chair Jordan. The gentleman yields back. The gentleman from
Missouri is recognized.
I am sorry, Jamie Raskin has a UC.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you for your indulgence, Mr. Chair. Three
quick UC requests: (1) from the New Republic, February 16,
2024, entitled, ``Twitter Files' Matt Taibbi Says Elon Musk
Sent Him Unhinged Messages.'' (2) Just Security, February 6,
2025, ``Connecting the Dots, Donald Trump's Tightening Grip on
Press Freedom.'' (3) On February 11, 2025, CNN, ``Musk Touts
DOGE Transparency, But Downplays His Conflicts of Interest.''
Chair Jordan. Without objection. The gentleman from
Missouri.
Mr. Onder. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Well, Mr. Chair, some of
our Democrat colleagues have said that this hearing is a waste
of time. That this hearing is a dumb hearing.
Ronald Reagan said, ``Our freedoms are never more than one
generation away from extinction.'' I cannot think of a more
important topic for a hearing than this one right here to
defend our First Amendment.
Mr. Shellenberger, I was very glad to hear you mention that
it used to be that the Left and Right were in agreement on the
topic of free speech. I am not quite old enough to remember,
but in the sixties, seventies, the campus radicals called their
movement the Free Speech Movement.
Boy, the radical Left does not seem to believe in free
speech today. The free speech, the censorship that we have seen
over the last few years, by in large, it has been censorship of
true information.
For all the words about here from the Surgeon General
confronting health misinformation, and also from the Surgeon
General, a community toolkit for addressing health
misinformation. What was this misinformation?
The origin of the virus as a lab leak, the inefficacy of
the vaccine, natural immunity. Complications of the vaccine
like myocarditis, but not limited to myocarditis.
The extraordinarily low morbidity and mortality of young,
healthy people, especially children, from the COVID vaccine,
and therefore, really the lack of need to vaccinate those kids.
The lack of efficacy for masks.
It was by in large true, but it was censored aggressively.
The two of you, of course, exposed that in the Twitter files.
In fact, as Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan what Elon Musk
did with the Twitter files, Jim Jordan and the House Judiciary
Committee did for the rest of our industry.
Mr. Taibbi, you are an expert on the topic of censorship. A
Democrat earlier asked you the question, is banning books
censorship? You said yes. I of course, would agree.
Are you aware of the Trump Administration trying to ban any
books?
Mr. Taibbi. No, not particularly. No.
Mr. Onder. Yes. Sometimes we have to make distinctions
here. Would you consider, in your opinion, is keeping
pornography and other sexually explicit material away from
children, is that censorship?
Mr. Taibbi. That is a completely different section of the
law as far as I understand.
Mr. Onder. Yes. I would think so. In your opinion, is a
Presidential Administration cutting funding to rogue programs
to promote transgender ideology when Congress never expressed
that intent, is that censorship?
Mr. Taibbi. No. I don't consider that censorship. It may be
controversial, but it is not--
Mr. Onder. It is controversial indeed. I don't view that as
censorship. Again, we see that this idea of misinformation not
only is it censoring misinformation, not only is it contrary to
the First Amendment, but my background is I am a medical
doctor.
In fact, the name of my specialty is Allergy and Clinical
Immunology. I am an Immunologist. So, to me, and we learned in
first year of medical school that the purpose of a vaccine is
to mimic a natural infection without getting the patient sick
or killing the patient. Therefore, inducing the immune
response.
So, natural immunity made sense to me. Marty Makary
testified about censorship during the COVID pandemic that over
200 studies have shown natural immunity is at least as
effective as vaccinated immunity. One of those 200 studies was
his study.
Big tech censored that as well as a lot of these other
studies. That is why when I heard Dr. Fauci talk about the
science, the whole point of science is that you don't label
things misinformation, because science isn't a thing.
Science isn't like the Bible, the Quran, or the Talmud.
Science is a process. You make observations. You design and
experiment based on those observations. You test that
hypothesis, and then you repeat the process.
So, to me, it is unscientific. It is against the First
Amendment and a violation of all our core principles to censor.
Thanks to you three for what you have done to defend the
First Amendment and really defend the most essential of our
rights.
Mr. Taibbi. Thank you.
Mr. Onder. Thank you.
Chair Jordan. The gentleman yields back. The gentleman from
North Carolina is recognized.
Mr. Harris. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to say to all of
you on the panel, thank you for your patience and your
perseverance.
I was speaking at a program one time and a gentleman next
to me looked at me and asked me if I was staying until the
bitter end. I said, ``son, I am the bitter end.'' I feel like I
am in that role today, Mr. Chair.
Chair Jordan. You are. You are.
Mr. Harris. So, but anyway, let me say this, on July 19,
2021, following directives from the Biden White House to
suppress so-called misinformation about vaccines, YouTube
removed a video by Family Research Council's Tony Perkins, that
featured him interviewing Mary Holland, who was serving as the
General Counsel of Children's Health Defense.
Because the topic included the mention of the COVID-19
vaccination program, YouTube claimed that the news segment
contained ``medical misinformation.'' However, the whole topic
of the interview was the lawsuit that Holland was bringing
against the Washington, DC, City Council, regarding parental
consent.
Initially, the appeals to restore the video were absolutely
denied. Ultimately, the video was restored, but it was three
days after FRC brought it to the attention of the press.
I want to just pose the question to you, Mr. Taibbi, at
least the Family Research Council had a platform to fight back
against this censorship. During your investigative reporting
for the Twitter files, were you seeing a lot of examples of
just ordinary Americans being censored?
Mr. Taibbi. Mr. Congressman, yes, absolutely. That is the
big difference with this system and the old system, which was
litigation based, and you had a chance to present your case to
a judge or a jury.
You mentioned the Family Research Council or Children's
Health Defense, amusingly, Joe Biden himself was censored
because he talked so much about vaccines that Facebook's
algorithm pushed him down accidentally, which triggered a
response from the White House.
Of course, they can do something about it. They could get
on the phone and talk to Facebook and complain about it. The
ordinary person just can't do that. They just wake up one
morning and they find they are off the internet in some cases.
The first cases that I looked at were basically mom and pop
small media businesses. There was a site called Reverb Press,
that was just a down the line Democratic site. It just woke up
one morning and was gone, it was off the internet. They have no
recourse.
That is the problem with the system. There is just for
wealthy people, for famous people, they can maybe do something
about it, but nobody else can.
Mr. Harris. So, absent legislation like the First Amendment
Accountability Act, what recourse is there for Americans?
Mr. Taibbi. You can try to find somebody who knows
somebody, who knows somebody, who maybe knows an executive.
That is basically it.
Mr. Harris. That is basically it. Well, thank you. Well,
Mr. Shellenberger, let me ask you, when Mr. Musk purchased
Twitter, which is now X, he implemented the concept of
community notes as an alternative to traditional fact checking.
On January 7, 2025, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta
would, among other policy changes, implement an X-inspired
community notes model for its platform. I know you have
expressed support for this policy change.
Can you just take a few moments in the time I have left, to
explain why the community note system is preferable to
traditional fact checking methods in terms of facilitating free
and open dialog online?
Mr. Shellenberger. Community notes is in the spirit of the
First Amendment, which is that truth is not something, that
truth is something that emerges through disagreement and
dialog, including through false information, we get at what the
true information is.
So, community notes are consistent with that. It doesn't
allow small groups of experts, who think they are experts, to
decide what the truth is in advance and then apply it to the
world.
You don't really need community notes. You can have
somebody who can reply to an X post and say, this is wrong for
these reasons, and it can go viral.
If you are going to have some kind of fact checking,
community notes is obviously the superior model. In fact, the
studies that have been done show that it does tend to be a
fairly reliable way to get to what is the right, to get to the
truth.
Mr. Harris. Excellent. Well, thank you very much. Again,
thanks to all of you on the panel.
Mr. Chair, I yield back my time.
Chair Jordan. The gentleman yields back. We are almost
there. The Chair now recognizes the Ranking Member for some
closing remarks and then I will close.
Mr. Raskin. Mr. Chair, thank you for a fascinating hearing,
and all our colleagues and the witnesses for hanging with us.
I taught Constitutional Law and the First Amendment for 25
years, Mr. Chair, and I used to tell my students that the First
Amendment is like an apple, and everybody wants to take one
bite out of the apple. If somebody doesn't like Left-wing
speech, take a bite.
If somebody doesn't like a Right-wing speech, take a bite.
If somebody doesn't like DEI speech, take a bite. If somebody
doesn't like gender ideology speech, take a bite.
Everybody takes just one bite out of the apple and at the
end of it, you know what is left? Nothing. The apple is gone.
It has been gobbled away. Which means that we have got a
responsibility to defend free speech in its entirety.
Now, the hearing we have had today has been fascinating in
a lot of ways. I do think that it ran roughshod over some basic
Constitutional distinctions that we do talk about in the First
Amendment, like whether we are in a public forum or a nonpublic
forum, a limited public forum, a private space, and all that
somewhat got stampeded in the political theatrics at different
points.
One thing that struck me was the fundamental agnosticism. I
hear from a lot of my colleagues about whether something called
the truth even exists anymore.
We are the products of an enlightenment Constitution by
people who really believed in the idea of facts and empirical
investigation. In fact, our entire judicial system is based on
that idea. When people go and testify in court, they swear to
tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Then, we have whole standards of evidence that are
organized around whether or not the case has been made in
criminal court. Have you been able to prove the facts so
intensely that it is beyond any reasonable doubt, or in civil
court, by a preponderance of the evidence.
So, our judicial system is based on the idea that there is
the truth. If you think about it, Mr. Chair, our democratic
system is based on the idea that there is the truth.
I heard people today and in other contexts saying, well,
no, we don't want to take down Russian disinformation on social
media sites telling people to go and vote on Wednesday,
November 9th, if the election is Tuesday, November 8th. That is
a violation of free speech as opposed to just a lie and a fraud
perpetrated on the public.
Think about it, we don't have democracy if we don't have a
concept of truth and the facts. Because at the end of the day,
Donald Trump might not like it, but there is an election and
somebody wins, and somebody loses.
He couldn't handle the fact that he lost in 2020, for
whatever reasons, financial, ideological, psychological,
emotional, I don't know. He lost by more than seven million
votes, 306-232 in the election.
The vexed politics and the divided polarized culture of our
time all had to do with his inability to accept that. Then, his
inciting a violent mob to come and attack our police officers,
wound them, hospitalize them, and tear the country apart.
The reality is, at the end of every election, we decide the
fact of who won and who lost. The inability to accept facts and
the idea that there are truths, is a very dangerous thing for
American democracy or any other democracy.
I will just say finally, Mr. Chair, there is an attack
going on the media. I am sorry that some of my colleagues
didn't deal with the fact that yes, President Trump has started
to ban this media entity, to punish these various newspaper
groups, to bring lawsuits for tens of millions of dollars on
totally bogus, fraudulent defamation charges. Then, forcing
those media entities to settle with him as a form of financial
and political tribute to the State.
What is this? Castro's Cuba? North Korea? Come on. Could we
get together on a bipartisan basis to reject that? Do we really
have to be so stuck in our partisan encampments that we can't
see that as a shakedown by the State against the people?
So, let's stand up for real. If we could in this Congress,
Mr. Chair, for the freedom of speech, for the freedom of press,
for the Right to petition government for a redress of
grievances, for the freedom of assembly, for the free exercise
of a religion, and for no establishment of religion. Let's at
least converge around that.
I thank you for your indulgence and I yield back to you.
Chair Jordan. The gentleman yields back. I would just say,
first, thank you all for being here too.
Just in response briefly, I am all for getting the facts
and the truth, and the way you get there is robust debate. It
is the First Amendment.
Ms. Crockett quoted scripture. There is a great scripture,
it is in Proverbs, it says, ``The first to present his case
seems right until another comes along and questions him.'' It
is called the principle of cross-examination.
That is basically the First Amendment. One person says one
thing, another person says something else, and we can figure
out the truth and the facts. If you are just getting one side
and again, from left or right in a political context, that is
the problem.
I am for the full apple, to use your metaphor. What I know
is, I don't know Mr. Aaron's background, but I know these three
people for defending the full apple, to use your metaphor
again, they have been harassed for doing it.
Mr. Taibbi had the IRS knock on his door, for goodness
sake. He had a Democrat Member of Congress threaten to refer
him to the Justice Department for prosecution, for goodness
sake.
Mr. Shellenberger is a wanted man in Brazil for standing up
for the truth, for the facts. In fact, I am going to ask a
question here.
Ms. Subramanya, I know what you did during the trucker
blockade. I know how you have testified, I know my guess, I
don't know specifically. My guess is you have been harassed and
targeted as well for your defense of the truth and the full
apple to stick with Mr. Raskin's.
Ms. Subramanya. Absolutely. A few months after I wrote my
story for the Free Press on the truckers protest, in June 2022,
I found myself in a study on a list of people, on a list of
people where the author, a professor at a university in
Calgary, which is a city in the Province of Alberta, a
federally funded study, basically was accusing me of spreading
Russian disinformation.
That is extraordinary. I was featured on this list with
Tulsi Gabbard and a bunch of others.
Chair Jordan. Yes. We know that whole spiel.
Ms. Subramanya. Yes. So, when I saw my name on this list, I
was absolutely horrified, because that is the chilling effect
of it.
Chair Jordan. So, here are three individuals, three
individuals who value the First Amendment and the truth so much
that they are willing to face the attacks that they have faced.
Value the freedom of the press, the freedom of speech, and the
rights we enjoy as Americans.
I want to thank you all for being here, you included Mr.
Aaron. I especially want to thank you three.
Ms. Subramanya. Thank you.
Chair Jordan. Because it has been for, I know over the last
several years what you have had to endure and your willingness
to come back again. We are going to have you back again at some
point, because I don't think nine hearings is enough on the
First Amendment.
As Mr. Grothman said, ``We should do this every single
week.'' Because, if you lose the First Amendment, you lose the
right to debate, everything else falls apart. It is just the
way it works.
So, again, thank you all for being here today. The
Committee is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 2:50 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]
All materials submitted for the record by Members of the
Committee on the Judiciary can be found at: https://
docs.house.gov/Committee/Calendar/ByEvent.aspx?EventID=117881.