Rep. Dan Bishop wants to know how much the FBI pressured other social media platforms.
U.S. Rep. Dan Bishop is leveraging Twitter to expose how the company worked with the FBI to silence free speech, the latest in a series of his recent posts that have gained significant social media attention.
“The FBI sought to silence constitutionally protected speech & access internal Twitter data to further their spying & censorship regime,” the North Carolina Republican posted Thursday, along with a video clip from a recent House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing. “The Twitter Files only tell part of the story. How much did the FBI pressure other social media platforms, ones w/ even more users & influence?”
The Twitter files refer to thousands of internal Twitter documents exposed by CEO Elon Musk and journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and others that expose how the company handled numerous issues. This includes its moderation process for a New York Post article on the Hunter Biden laptop controversy; shadow banning; Donald Trump’s suspension from the platform; and FBI communications with the company’s Trust and Safety Team.
The video posted by Bishop on Thursday featured testimony from George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley, a nationally recognized constitutional law scholar.
“The question that gets at me is this,” Bishop says in the 1 minute, 52-second video clip of the committee hearing. “How could the FBI, which is sworn to protect the Constitution, ever justify using intense application of its resources, agents, etcetera, to urge social media platforms to use those standards to take down speech the Constitution protects?”