WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans will dig into claims of government censorship of online speech in a public hearing, calling on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to testify despite calls from outside groups to disinvite the presidential nominee Democrat after his recent anti-Semitic comments. .
The Republican-led Select Subcommittee on Federal Government Armaments will meet on Thursday. Republicans say conservatives are being unfairly targeted by tech companies that routinely work with the government to try to curb the spread of misinformation online.
In announcing the hearing, the panel headed by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said it will “examine the federal government’s role in censoring Americans.”
The panel said it will investigate “Big Tech’s collusion with out-of-control government agencies to silence speech.”
The hearing comes after a federal judge recently tried to block the Biden administration from working with social media companies to monitor disinformation and other online postings. An appeals court temporarily stayed the order.
Republicans are eager to elevate Kennedy, heir to America’s famous political family, who in April announced his 2024 presidential campaign. The son of Bobby Kennedy and nephew of John F. Kennedy is mounting a long-term Democratic primary challenger to President Joe Biden. He must testify along with two other witnesses.
A watchdog group called on the panel’s chairman, Jordan, to drop the invitation to Kennedy after the Democratic presidential nominee falsely suggested that COVID-19 may have been “ethnically targeted” to save Ashkenazi Jews and the Chinese people.
In filmed remarks first published by The New York Post, Kennedy said “there is an argument” that COVID-19 “is an ethnic target” and that it “disproportionally attacks certain races.”
After the video was made public, Kennedy tweeted that his words were distorted and denied ever suggesting that COVID-19 was deliberately engineered to save Jews. He asked that the Post article be retracted.
But Kennedy has a history of comparing vaccines, widely credited with saving millions of lives, to the genocide of the Holocaust during Nazi Germany, comments for which he has sometimes apologized.
An organization that Kennedy founded, Children’s Health Defense, currently has a lawsuit pending against several news organizations, including The Associated Press, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking steps to identify misinformation, including about COVID vaccines and covid
Jordan said that while he disagreed with Kennedy’s statements, he wasn’t about to drop him from the panel. Speaker Kevin McCarthy took a similar view, saying he did not want to censure Kennedy.
The panel wants to investigate how the federal government works with tech companies to flag posts that contain false information or outright lies. The debate over the debate is part of the federal communications law, Section 230, which protects tech companies like Twitter and Facebook from liability for what is said on their platforms.
Lawmakers on the panel are also expected to hear testimony from Breitbart News reporter Emma-Jo Morris, who has reported extensively on Biden’s son, Hunter Biden; and D. John Sauer, a former Missouri attorney general who is now a special assistant attorney general for the Louisiana Department of Justice involved in the lawsuit against the Biden administration.
Before the hearing, Morris tweeted part of her opening statements in which she described an “elaborate censorship conspiracy” that she said was intended to stop her reporting on Hunter Biden.
The United States has been hesitant to regulate the social media giants, even as outside groups warn of the rise of hate speech and misinformation that could be erosive to civil society.
