Explained: Why ex-top Twitter executive Vijaya Gadde is being grilled by US House committee

On Wednesday, three former Twitter executives including Vijaya Gadde were grilled by the House Oversight and Accountability Committee. Gadde, former Twitter chief legal head, Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety and James Baker, the company’s former deputy general counsel, were subpoenaed by the Republican-led committee to answer questions about the company’s decision to limit the reach of a New York Post article on President Joe Biden’s son Hunter prior to the 2020 election. The grilling of former top Twitter executives comes in the aftermath of the Republicans taking control of the US House as well as new leadership of the social media company under Elon Musk. Republicans have for long claimed that Twitter conspired to suppress information regarding Hunter that would damage Joe Biden’s candidacy ahead of the 2020 election. Gadde, Baker and Roth were all senior executives at Twitter when the company decided to temporarily prevent users from posting a 2020 New York Post article on Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine based on information purportedly found on his personal laptop. Elon Musk said he fired Gadde and Baker after he took control of Twitter in October. Roth resigned from the company. Let’s take a closer look at what happened: What did Republicans allege? House Republicans, who have vowed to investigate a range of Biden administration policies along with Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, used the hearing entitled “Protecting Speech from Government Interference and Social Media Bias, Part 1: Twitter’s Role in Suppressing the Biden Laptop Story.” to rail against the company’s handling of the Hunter story. The hearing marked the first public proceedings of an investigation into the Biden family’s business dealings led by committee Chairman James Comer, who has accused Hunter Biden of leveraging his father’s political influence to pursue lucrative international business deals. Comer said the hearing is the panel’s “first step in examining the coordination between the federal government and Big Tech to restrict protected speech and interfere in the democratic process.” “America witnessed a coordinated campaign by social media companies, mainstream news, and the intelligence community to suppress and de-legitimize the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop and its contents,” Comer said. Axios quoted Rep James Comer of Kentucky as saying, “In the runup to the 2020 presidential election, Big Tech and the Swamp colluded to censor reporting about the Biden family’s shady business schemes. “Americans deserve answers about this attack on the First Amendment …. Accountability is coming.”

Forbes quoted Representative Jim Jordan of accusing the former senior Twitter employees of being ‘played’ by the FBI.

“We have Mr Baker here, a former FBI agent, and there seems to be a revolving door between the FBI and Twitter itself,” far-right firebrand Lauren Boebert alleged. “You exercised an amazing amount of clout and power over the entire American electorate by even holding (this story) hostage for 24 hours and then reversing your policy,” Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona said to the panel of witnesses. How did ex-Twitter execs respond? The former executives said during the hearing Wednesday that blocking the story was an error that they reversed within 24 hours. Twitter at the time removed tweets about the Post story and even blocked the account.

Gadde said it appeared at the time that the article may have been based on hacked materials.

The newspaper story was greeted at the time with skepticism due to questions about the laptop’s origins, including Giuliani’s involvement, and because top officials in the Trump administration had already warned that Russia was working to denigrate Joe Biden before the White House election. The Kremlin interfered in the 2016 race by hacking Democratic emails that were subsequently leaked, and fears that Russia would meddle again in the 2020 race were widespread across Washington. Months later, Twitter’s then-CEO, Jack Dorsey, called the company’s communications around the Post article “not great.” He added that blocking the article’s URL with “zero context” around why it was blocked was “unacceptable.” Gadde, Twitter’s former chief legal officer, said the tweets of the New York Post article included images that looked like they might have been obtained through hacking. [caption id=“attachment_12137842” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] From left, James Baker, Former Deputy General Counsel of Twitter, Vijaya Gadde, Former Chief Legal Officer of Twitter, Yoel Roth, Former Global Head of Trust & Safety of Twitter, and former Twitter employee Anika Collier Navaroli, are sworn in to testify during a House Committee on Oversight and Accountability hearing. AP[/caption] “We had developed a policy intended to prevent Twitter from becoming a dumping ground for hacked materials. We applied this policy to the New York Post’s tweets and blocked links to articles,” Gadde said. Baker, responding directly to Jordan’s claim, said he was unaware of any “unlawful collusion with, or direction from, any government agency or political campaign” with regard to the Hunter piece. Baker denied any wrongdoing during his two years at Twitter and said that despite disagreeing with the decision to block links to the Post story, “I believe that the public record reveals that my client acted in a manner that was fully consistent with the First Amendment.” Baker, a frequent target of Republican scrutiny, was the FBI’s general counsel during the opening of two of the bureau’s most consequential investigations in history: the Hillary Clinton investigation and a separate inquiry into potential coordination between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Republicans have long criticized the FBI’s handling of both investigations. The former executives also said Twitter’s policies were intended to mitigate content that could lead to political violence, such as what later occurred in the 6 January, 2021, attack on the US Capitol by Trump’s supporters. “I am here to tell you that doing nothing is not an option. If we continue to do nothing, violence is going to happen again,” said Anika Collier Navaroli, a former member of Twitter’s US safety policy team. But Navaroli, a witness called by the Democrats, turned the tables on the Republicans. Navaroli said the Trump White House in 2019 asked the company to remove a tweet by celebrity Chrissy Teigen that mocked the then president. Teigen responded to the revelation on Twitter:

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  Navaroli testified to the 6 January committee last year that Twitter executives often tolerated Trump’s posts despite them including false statements and violations of the company’s own rules because executives knew the platform was his “favorite and most-used … and enjoyed having that sort of power.” Hunter Biden’s attorney Abbe Lowell has denied in a statement any connection between his client and what he called the “so-called laptop,” including contents that Republicans “allege to be Mr Biden’s personal data.”

Democrats on the committee dismissed it as a trivial and outdated Republican fixation.

“Silly does not even begin to capture this obsession,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, the committee’s top Democrat. Representative Dan Goldman of New York called the hearing a “fishing expedition” seeking to reheat bogus allegations claiming Biden somehow influenced his son’s business dealings in Ukraine. Even before the proceedings began, the White House denounced the hearing as “a bizarre political stunt” motivated by denial of Biden’s 2020 election victory over Republican former President Donald Trump. Trump continues to claim falsely that his defeat was the result of fraud. “This appears to be the latest effort by the House Republican majority’s most extreme MAGA members to question and re-litigate the outcome of the 2020 election,” White House spokesperson Ian Sams said in a statement. Companies have been bracing for Republican-led probes touching on social media content-moderation policies, sustainable investing practices and corporate connections to China. There has been no evidence that Twitter’s platform is biased against conservatives; studies have found the opposite when it comes to conservative media in particular. But the issue continues to preoccupy GOP members of congress. The Hunter story was also reignited recently after Musk took over Twitter as CEO and began to release a slew of company information to independent journalists, what he has called the “Twitter Files.” The documents and data largely show internal debates among employees over the decision to temporarily censor links to the Hunter Biden story. The tweet threads lacked substantial evidence of a targeted influence campaign from Democrats or the FBI, which has denied any involvement in Twitter’s decision-making. Just last week, lawyers for the younger Biden asked the Justice Department to investigate people who say they accessed his personal data. But they did not acknowledge that the data came from a laptop Hunter Biden is purported to have dropped off at a computer repair shop. Some experts said questions around government influence on Big Tech’s content moderation are legitimate. “Despite how I would change how some of the members ask their questions, there should be more insight into this stuff. There should be more transparency,” said Katie Harbath, a fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center who served as Facebook’s former public policy director. She added, “There’s still a lot more hearings and sides to the story that we need to hear from, particularly the government and the FBI.”