Graham considers subpoenas for Twitter, Facebook execs over Hunter Biden emails
'If an agreement for voluntary testimony is not reached, the committee will vote on authorizing the subpoenas.'
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., is considering subpoenaing social media executives over their platforms' role in suppressing news about the alleged emails involving former Vice President Joe Biden's son Hunter.
The committee staff is currently working with Facebook and Twitter to have Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, the companies' respective CEOs, appear before the committee on Oct. 22.
"If an agreement for voluntary testimony is not reached, the committee will vote on authorizing the subpoenas at a date to be determined," a committee press release reads.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The release included a draft motion for the Oct. 22 hearing. In addition to the CEOs testimonies, it would call for "any other content-moderation policies, practices, or actions that may interfere with or influence elections for federal office" as well as "any other recent determinations to temporarily reduce distribution of material pending fact-checker review and/or block and mark material as potentially unsafe."
A spokesperson for Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who also sits on the committee, told Fox News the senator expected both companies to testify. “Sen. Cruz has been working with Chairman Graham and expects both Twitter and Facebook to testify before the Judiciary Committee before Election Day," the spokesperson said.
Graham's latest move comes amid widespread accusations that social media platforms favor Democrats in the way they regulate the distribution of certain content. Both platforms have denied acting out of political bias.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Twitter took a number of steps to stop the social media spread of New York Post articles on purported emails, including locking the newspaper's account and that of the Trump campaign for tweeting about the report. Twitter argued the article violated Twitter rules, but has since backed off and announced new policies.
"Straight blocking of URLs was wrong, and we updated our policy and enforcement to fix," Dorsey tweeted Friday. "Our goal is to attempt to add context, and now we have capabilities to do that."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The tech giant claimed it took action against the article due to the company's "Hacked Materials Policy."
President Trump and other Republicans have called for a repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which states "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
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{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The section has been pivotal in the rise of today's social media giants by allowing not only Internet service providers – but also Google, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and others – to be shielded from liability from content posted on their platforms by third parties, in most cases. But some critics on the right feel that tech giants should no longer benefit from protections of Section 230 if they censor conservative viewpoints, including controversial postings by Trump.
The conservative Media Reseach Center released a report Monday claiming that Twitter and Facebook had censored President Trump's posts 65 times, with the bulk of censorship coming from Twitter, since May of 2018. Biden's accounts were "untouched," according to the watchdog.
Fox News' Marisa Schultz, Nick Givas, Kelly Phares, and Brian Flood contributed to this report.