House Judiciary Committee Decries ‘Foreign Censorship’ on Social Media

Are foreign governments restricting Americans’ free speech on online platforms?

The House Judiciary Committee said Thursday (Feb. 27) that it has subpoenaed a group of tech giants seeking answers.

“American companies are sounding the alarm about how foreign censorship harms American civil liberties,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the committee’s chair, said in a news release.

“X has pushed back against lawless judicial orders in Brazil and Australia mandating global content takedowns.”

In addition, Jordan said, Meta has stressed the need to “push back” against censorship by foreign governments, but said it needs the U.S. government’s support.

X is owned by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and now top advisor to President Donald Trump. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, has in recent months given his support to the Republican president, donating $1 million to his inauguration fund and removing the restrictions placed on Trump after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

In addition to the Musk and Zuckerberg social platforms, the Republican-led committee has sent subpoenas to Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, TikTok and Rumble.

“The Committee must understand how and to what extent foreign governments have limited Americans’ access to lawful speech in the United States,” Jordan said.

The news comes two days after Trump’s nominee for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Mark Meador, said during a Senate confirmation hearing that the agency should continue its efforts to fight censorship on tech platforms.

Meador said that the agency is “off to the right start” and that it could initiate cases against any platforms that colluded to set up content moderation standards or deceived consumers about the application of the platforms’ terms of service.

As noted here, Meador is an attorney who presented Rumble — a platform popular with conservatives, and whose cloud service hosts Trump’s Truth Social — in antitrust lawsuits against Google and advertisers that the platform allegedly boycotted.

The FTC said last week that it was seeking public comment on “tech censorship,” arguing that platforms could be breaking the law when they deny users’ access to services based on the content of their speech or affiliations.

The argument that conservatives are being censored on social media predates Trump’s victory. Researchers at New York University have found that it has no basis in reality.

That 2021 study, by disinformation expert Paul Barrett and researcher J Grant Sims, found that rather than silencing conservatives, social media platforms have, through algorithms, amplified right-leaning voices, “often affording conservatives greater reach than liberal or nonpartisan content creators.”