The House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government held a hearing Thursday on the Twitter Files, giving independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger the opportunity to present their reporting to Congress.
The Twitter Files, which show that multiple arms of the federal government—including the FBI, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the State Department, and the White House under both Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden—pressured social media companies to restrict speech, are of some concern to Republican lawmakers; it was Rep. Jim Jordan (R–Ohio) who invited Taibbi and Shellenberger to attend. Since government action is at the core of this insidious push for censorship—which is also present at Facebook, as Reason's investigation has shown—it is appropriate for Congress to probe, and hopefully, to limit, the federal bureaucracy's ability to shape the rules of online discourse.
