I’m curious how Republicans would react if AOC suddenly sought to hold a hearing questioning Elon Musk’s bias in endorsing and promoting Donald Trump on ExTwitter. I imagine there would be apocalyptic outrage and nonstop cries of tyranny over such a blatant abuse of power to punish someone for their political views.
And they’d be right.
But it’s striking that no one batted an eye when the Republicans did that over the past few years.
For years, we highlighted how the claims of supposed “leftwing bias” in content moderation at the various big platform websites was total bullshit. Studies repeatedly showed that it wasn’t true at all. If anything, these websites bent over backwards to cater to rule-breaking Trumpists.
And yet, Congress held multiple hearings, in which Republican senators and congressional reps would drag the CEOs of the companies into hours-long hearings to demand to know why they were “censoring” conservative speech and to harangue them for their biases.
As we said at the time, this was deeply problematic and an attack on free speech (something you’ll never hear any of the free speech grifter crew ever mention). In one hearing, the CEOs were asked to reveal the political registrations of their employees, which is none of anyone’s business.
Either way, as things stand right now, Elon (who once insisted that Twitter must remain “neutral”) has loudly endorsed (and promised to fund the campaign of) Donald Trump.
Since then, his ExTwitter feed is just a non-stop flood of pro-Trump content.
And, to be clear, he is absolutely free to do this. That is his free speech. And also, ExTwitter, as a company, also has its own free speech rights to do the same exact thing.
Meanwhile, companies like Meta have chosen to hire one of the main authors of the Project 2025 plan from Heritage Foundation, which is the playbook of authoritarian vengeance and retribution planned for the second Trump administration. The biggest VCs in Silicon Valley are all lining up behind Trump under the cynical belief that a chaotic 2nd term will somehow help the tech industry.
It’s almost as if the idea that the industry were just bastions of leftist thought, who used their power to stifle conservatives was always overblown nonsense, used to try to punish the companies for their own (and their employees’) speech.
So, why isn’t Congress calling for investigations?
I mean, obviously, the answer is that it was all grandstanding nonsense for the ignorant. It was all for show, control, and power. It was never actually about policy, because Washington DC these days isn’t about policy. It’s pure politics of power.
And, again, let me be clear: it would be a travesty for anyone to investigate Elon’s company (or the other platforms) for bias now. It would be an attack on the platforms and their owners for exercising their First Amendment rights. But it was equally bad the last few years as well, and that didn’t stop the Republicans in Congress from doing so. Nor were there many voices raised in protest about the types of questions they were asked, because attacking tech was seen as a bipartisan game (though the attacks were different).
So, of course, I’m not really calling on Congress to go through that nonsense again. But it does seem worth pointing out the utter hypocrisy of those who called and cheered on those show trials and how they will never even think about doing the same thing now.
It’s almost as if Congress isn’t concerned with the actual policy issues, but rather abusing their power to harass those they view as political opponents.
