We’ve seen a lot of concerning censorship efforts on social media by the Biden administration. A recent federal court decision in Missouri v. Biden busted the Biden team big time and imposed a preliminary injunction on them not to illegally censor. It tells you where the Biden team is, as the court noted in denying a stay of the injunction, that the Biden administration is appealing and wants to fight an injunction that only prohibited illegal conduct. Earlier in the week, I reported on a story that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves — the FBI colluded with the Ukrainian spy agency SBU to try to censor U.S. users on social media. The Ukrainians would highlight who they wanted flagged, and then the FBI would lean on the social media companies.
That’s why it’s so gratifying to have Elon Musk in charge of Twitter because he’s spoken out against such collusion and released the Twitter Files, which have shown a lot of the prior bad behavior from Twitter 1.0 before he took over. But that hasn’t made the people on the left happy with him. They don’t seem to like the concept of free speech, which tends to butt up against the narratives that they want to sell.
Now there’s bombshell information about the alleged effort to go after Musk and Twitter by the Biden team.
Ernst & Young (EY) is the independent assessor who was engaged under a consent order between Twitter and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to evaluate Twitter’s privacy, data protection, and information security program. But EY felt that the FTC was improperly trying to influence their assessment of Twitter after Musk took over. XCorp (the name successor entity behind Twitter) has now filed a motion for a protective order against what the FTC has been doing to them and seeking to modify or be freed from the consent order because of such actions against them.
We knew they were harassing @elonmusk, but it was worse than we thought. https://t.co/S1Rkduz1D5
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) July 13, 2023
Recent sworn testimony details how the FTC, through a series of interactions with EY immediately after Elon Musk acquired Twitter, attempted to co-opt EY’s independent assessment in order to generate evidence of “deficiencies in Twitter’s privacy and information security program.” These efforts included dictating to EY “very specific types of procedures that they expected” EY to perform and “[conveying] expectations … about what th[e] results should be before [EY] had even begun any procedures.” The FTC was so “adamant” with EY, conveying that “this is absolutely what you will do and this is going to occur, and you’ll produce a report at the end of the day” that would be negative about Twitter, that senior EY leaders feared that, if EY resigned as the independent assessor, “[t]he FTC [would] take[] exception to [EY’s] withdrawal and create[] ‘other’ challenges for EY over time.”
The House Weaponization Committee called it the “weaponization of the federal government in action.”
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) put the chair of the FTC in the hot seat on Thursday, bluntly asking during a hearing, “Why are you harassing Twitter?” He also said that the FTC was demanding to know what journalists Twitter had been in contact with, which seems to be tripping all over the First Amendment. He said it was particularly troubling in the context of them looking into the government suppression of speech on social media platforms.
Why’s Joe Biden’s FTC afraid of free speech? pic.twitter.com/hTZIrj2GmN
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) July 13, 2023
Jordan broke it all down about the pressure on EY to find things against Twitter and asked Khan if Democrats had asked her to do this. She denied that.
!!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 13, 2023
Khan said she couldn’t comment on the motion because it must be new, and the work was delegated to the front-line staff, so she didn’t know things like the name of the EY guy who gave a deposition on this matter. Jordan said that wasn’t an excuse since she knew she was coming and was going to be questioned about this.
Twitter owner Elon Musk summed it up for everyone, “Extremely concerning.”
Extremely concerning https://t.co/V2TkhWbe6e
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 13, 2023
He also termed it “Insanely illegal overreach.”
Insanely illegal overreach by FTC
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 13, 2023
You can say that again. Who are the real fascists here?