Republicans on Capitol Hill last week were keen to score points against Democrats by pushing the narrative that the federal government was working with Twitter to censor a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
However, in the process they conceded a spectacular own goal as it was revealed that it was in fact former President Donald Trump who had reached out to Twitter to have tweets removed that he found offensive—including one where model Chrissy Teigen called him a “pussy ass bitch.”
Mike Masnick, founder and editor of the Techdirt blog, told The New Abnormal the GOP was foolish to think the move wouldn’t backfire in the way they did.
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“Clearly Republicans know that they’ve made these requests as well and so to put this into a congressional hearing and thinking that their own actions were not going to come out during the hearing, just seems like they have just this weird blind spot in recognizing how their own actions are going to come back and play out for them,” he said.
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday revealed that Twitter had actually changed its abusive content rules to avoid punishing Trump when he tweeted that she should “go back” to where she came from.
“There are many other examples of this, but this is one that happened to come out in the hearing of Twitter absolutely bending over backwards to help conservatives, which is like the exact opposite of what the hearing and tons of people keep insisting,” he said.
“How would the Republicans feel if the Democrats did the same thing and called Fox News executives into a hearing and demanded to know their editorial process and who did they put on the air and who did they refuse to put on the air? And how do they decide what their lead stories are? Like, everyone would see that as a very clear First Amendment problem because it’s Congress interfering with, you know, the First Amendment editorial process of a private company and yet that’s what happened with this hearing.”
