


The House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government is set to reconvene this week for its first hearing in more than four months, featuring testimony from two of the authors behind the “Twitter Files.”
The hearing is scheduled for Thursday, just days ahead of the first anniversary of the first Twitter Files report, which detailed the company’s moderation decisions, that was published on Dec. 2, 2022. The meeting will be the subcommittee’s first hearing since House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who previously sat on the committee, was elected to the top leadership position.
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Three witnesses are slated to appear, including Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, two of the journalists responsible for the release of the Twitter Files, as well as Rupa Subramanya, who writes for the Free Press and other outlets.
The hearing will focus on examining “the federal government’s involvement in social media censorship,” citing evidence in the Twitter Files that details the social media platform’s response to the Jan. 6 riots and the subsequent banning of former President Donald Trump.
The hearing will also examine what conservative lawmakers view as “recent attacks on independent journalism and free expression,” according to the committee’s press release. The meeting will take place at 10 a.m. on Thursday.
The weaponization subcommittee held a hearing on the Twitter Files featuring Taibbi and Shellenberger during a meeting in early March, during which Democrats and Republicans on the panel clashed over the legitimacy of the report. Republicans spent much of their time arguing the files showed an intentional effort by the federal government and Big Tech to censor content while Democrats attempted to discredit the two writers for their work.
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The Twitter Files is a collection of documents and internal communications from the company that details the behind-the-scenes decision-making of some of the social media platform’s top executives to suppress news stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020. X CEO and billionaire Elon Musk had long teased the release of the report after taking control of the company last October as part of his pledge to increase transparency on the site.
The files were released in a series of 19 installments posted on the social media platform between December 2022 and March 2023 and have since sparked debate over company moderation policies and censorship targeted toward conservative voices.