House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, released a Twitter Files-like thread Thursday, where he revealed what he called a Facebook censorship operation by President Joe Biden’s White House.
Jordan’s “Facebook Files Part 1” alleged the White House and administration officials pressured Facebook to censor Americans with “unconstitutional” force, including work to block “a meme” about vaccination, and a Tucker Carlson video.
“Never-before-released internal documents subpoenaed by the Judiciary Committee PROVE that Facebook and Instagram censored posts and changed their content moderation policies because of unconstitutional pressure from the Biden White House,” Jordan tweeted in a 19-post Twitter Files-like thread unrolled here.
The White House declined to comment on the allegations of pressure to censor Americans, through White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre at the daily press briefing.
“So what I can say, honestly, on this because it’s an on-going case,” Jean-Pierre said, referring to a federal court ruling earlier this month that the Biden administration cease communicating with private Big Tech companies on its content moderation agenda.
“We’re going to be very careful about speaking about this,” she added, before flipping to a prepared statement on the matters.
“As I have repeated many times from here, we have promoted responsible actions to protect public health safety and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic and foreign attacks on our elections,” her statement concluded, before speaking further to reporters.
“And we have consistently made clear that we believe social media companies have a critical responsibility to take account of the affects of their platforms that they have on the American people, while making independent decisions about the content of their platforms.
“That continues to be the case. That has not changed on what we believe here.”
At the conclusion of the Jordan’s thread, the House Judiciary chair revealed the documents were received after the House Judiciary Committee had planned a vote to hold Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress.
That vote and charge are still potentially in play, according to Jordan.
“These documents, AND OTHERS that were just produced to the committee, prove that the Biden admin. abused its powers to coerce Facebook into censoring Americans, preventing free and open discourse on issues of critical public importance,” Jordan tweeted.
“Only after the Committee announced its intention to hold Mark Zuckerberg in contempt did Facebook produce ANY internal documents to the Committee, including these documents, which PROVE that government pressure was directly responsible for censorship on Facebook,” Jordan continued in a tweet.
“Based on Facebook’s newfound commitment to fully cooperate with the Committee’s investigation, the Committee has decided to hold contempt in abeyance,” Jordan concluded.
“To be clear, contempt is still on the table and WILL be used if Facebook fails to cooperate in FULL.”