The new Speaker of the House, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) previously blasted Twitter for acting as an “FBI subsidiary” in the years before Elon Musk took over the company.
Rep. Johnson, who won the speaker’s gavel with no opposition from Republicans, made the comments in a hearing on the Twitter Files in March. At the time, Breitbart News spotlighted his comments as one of the standout moments of the hearing. As Speaker of the House, Rep. Johnson will now be well position to put forward measures aimed at curbing the censorship of American voices online — and block legislation that would make the problem worse, like the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA).
“The federal government, from Democrat members of congress to intelligence agencies, including the FBI, used Twitter and other social media companies to censor Americans’ speech. If the alarm bells are not going off, then you’re not paying attention,” said Rep. Johnson during the hearing, which featured testimony from Twitter Files reporter Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger.
“The communication between Twitter and the FBI – it was content, it was pervasive. Twitter was basically an FBI subsidiary before Elon Musk took it over.”
“Twitter was engaged in open information sharing with the intelligence community, and now we know there were many intelligence agencies apparently involved in this. The FBI pressured Twitter to act on election related tweets leading up to the 2022 election… and Twitter dutifully censored content.”
Prior to becoming Speaker, Rep. Johnson was a member of the House Judiciary Committee, which under chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) created a select committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government to investigate collusion between federal agencies and Big Tech companies to censor Americans. It was during a session of this select committee that Rep. Johnson eviscerated the collusion between the FBI and Twitter.
“Twitter has used its internal tools to control and manipulate speech considered misinformation. And who was determining that? It was the government bureaucrats.”
“Documents show that Twitter used visibility filtering to restrict certain accounts and posts and remove people from the platform altogether. The Twitter Files should be a matter of bipartisan concern for every member of congress and every American citizen, because it is a bedrock principle of our constitutional system that the government does not get to decide what speech is acceptable or true.”
“Americans have a right to speak freely regardless of whether their speech upsets the preferred narrative. In fact, that’s when it needs the most protection. The American people can’t and shouldn’t rely on ‘experts’ to be the arbiters of truth – ‘disinformation’ boards and the like.”
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.