Former Twitter executives conceded Wednesday that they made a mistake by blocking a story about Hunter Biden, the president’s son, from the social media platform in the run-up to the 2020 election, but adamantly denied Republican assertions that they were pressured by Democrats and law enforcement to suppress the story.
“The decisions here aren’t straightforward, and hindsight is 20/20,” Yoel Roth, the company's former head of trust and safety, told lawmakers. “It isn’t obvious what the right response is to a suspected, but not confirmed, cyberattack by another government on a presidential election.”
"Twitter erred in this case because we wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2016," Roth added.
Three former executives appeared before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee to testify for the first time about the company's decision in the weeks before the 2020 election to initially block from Twitter a New York Post article about the contents of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden.
"Today's hearing is the House Oversight and Accountability Committee's first step in examining the coordination between the federal government and Big Tech to restrict protected speech and interfere in the democratic process," Rep. James Comer, the chairman, said in his opening statement.
The witnesses Republicans subpoenaed to testify were Vijaya Gadde, Twitter's former chief legal officer; James Baker, the company's former deputy general counsel; and Yoel Roth, former head of safety and integrity.
The Post first reported in October 2020, weeks before the presidential election, that it had received from Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, a copy of a hard drive from a laptop that Hunter Biden had dropped off 18 months earlier at a Delaware computer repair shop and never retrieved. Twitter blocked people from sharing links to the story for several days.
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."
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 had 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.
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 that data came from a laptop that Hunter Biden is purported to have dropped off at a computer repair shop.
The issue was also reignited recently after Elon 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."
“Thank god for Matt Taibi," Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., said, referencing one of the independent journalists with access to company files. "Thank god for Elon Musk for allowing us to show the world that Twitter was basically a subsidiary of the FBI."
The documents and data largely show internal debates among employees over the decision to temporarily censor links to the story about Hunter Biden. 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.
Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., called the hearing a “fishing expedition” seeking to reheat bogus allegations claiming Biden somehow influenced his son’s business dealings in Ukraine.
Nonetheless, Republicans including Comer, R-Ky., have used the Post story, which has not been independently verified by The Associated Press, as the basis for what they claim is another example of the Biden family's “influence peddling."
The executives testified that while mistakes were made in the company's handling of the situation, the FBI had nothing to do with the blocking of the story.
“I am aware of no unlawful collusion with, or direction from, any government agency or political campaign on how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation,” Baker told lawmakers in his opening statement. “Even though many disagree with how Twitter handled the Hunter Biden matter, I believe that the public record reveals that my client acted in a manner that was fully consistent with the First Amendment.”
Baker has been the target of much Republican scrutiny. He 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.
Baker vehemently denied that he acted as "an agent or an operator" for the U.S. government while working for the company.
Gadde acknowledged that "in hindsight, Twitter should have reinstated the Post's account immediately given the circumstances."
The hearing featured a number of contentious moments, including Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene interrupting California Rep. Jimmy Gomez's questioning of Roth as he was discussing why her account was suspended from the platform. Greene's account was permanently suspended in January of last year for violating the company's COVID-19 misinformation policy, but her account was reinstated in November under new Twitter owner Elon Musk.
"Who made you in charge of what’s true and what’s false?" she interjected, accusing the executives of election interference because it was not only her personal account, but the one for her campaign, as well as suppression of the First Amendment.
Democrats made the case at Wednesday's hearing that GOP lawmakers were "bullying" the former executives, calling the hearing a fruitless endeavor.
"We’re wasting our time here bullying former Twitter employees," said Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost, first member of Generation Z elected to Congress. "It’s calling the refs, so that way in the future when they want disinformation to be put on the internet, social media companies will be scared to call them out down the road."
Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., called the hearing an “abuse of public resources.”
"We could be talking about health care," the New York progressive said. "We could be talking about bringing down the cost of prescription drugs. We could be talking about abortion rights, civil rights, voting rights. But instead we’re talking about Hunter Biden’s half-fake laptop story. I mean this is an embarrassment.”
Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., compared the length of Wednesday's hearing to the amount of time that the story was unable to be shared on the platform – and that wasn't the only correlation she made regarding the hearing.
"For nearly six hours, we have been going back and forth about this supposed suppression of a single news story from a single outlet for a single day," the California Democrat said. "This hearing has been in its length, nearly one quarter of the amount of time that Twitter users could not share the link. We are spending almost as much time screaming about this as we are, this was ever a problem."
"Look, criminal activity is always a concern," she continued. "But if -- if -- there is criminal wrongdoing on Hunter Biden's laptop, that is a matter for the FBI and our law enforcement agencies. Today's hearing is merely an exercise in misinformation and disinformation. A free-for-all hellscape."
Democrats called a witness of their own, Anika Collier Navaroli, a former employee with Twitter's content moderation team. She testified last year to the House committee that investigated the Capitol riot about Twitter's preferential treatment of Donald Trump until the then-president was banned from Twitter two years ago.
For Democrats, Navaroli was expected to counter the GOP argument by testifying about how Twitter allowed Trump's tweets despite the misinformation they sometimes contained. She testified to the Jan. 6 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."
Navaroli offered a stark warning Wednesday about what could transpire if officials take no action to address such issues.
"If we're here to talk social media and the government, we need to talk about Twitter's failure to act before Jan. 6," Navaroli said Wednesday. "I'm here to tell you that doing nothing is not an option. If we continue to do nothing, violence is going to happen again."
On the subject of content moderation, Navaroli said that "far too often there are far too few of us asked to do the impossible," using the example of the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in January 2020.
"After the U.S. assassinated an Iranian general and the U.S. president decided to justify it on Twitter, management literally instructed me and my team to make sure that World War 3 did not start on the platform," Navaroli said. "No person, people or company should have that kind of unchecked power, or that kind of responsibility."
"The modern-day public conversation should not be susceptible to the whims of any one individual or any one company," she continued, adding that "fixing the systemic issues that lead to bad decisions is not going to be easy."
Democrats pressed Navaroli on the Trump administration's efforts to remove Twitter posts from the platform. She testified that the Trump White House asked the company to remove a profanity-laden 2019 Tweet from model Chrissy Teigen that was critical of former President Trump. The company ultimately chose not to remove the post, she said.
"In my role, I was not responsible for receiving any sort of request from the government," Navaroli told Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Democrat. "However, what I was privy to was my supervisors letting us know that we had received something along those lines or something of a request. And in that particular instance, I do remember hearing that we had received a request from the White House to make sure that we evaluated this tweet, and that they wanted it to come down because it was a derogatory statement."
"To my recollection, I thought that was an inappropriate action by a government official level on the White House," she added.
"But it wasn't Joe Biden about his son's laptop," Connolly pressed. "It was Donald Trump because he didn't like what Chrissy Teigen had to say about him, is that correct?"
"Yes, that is correct," she replied.
"Would you ever think it's appropriate for the President of the United States to direct or otherwise influence, a social media company to take down its content?" he asked.
"I think it's a very slippery slope," Navaroli said.
The hearing is the GOP's opening act into what lawmakers promise will be a widespread investigation into President Joe Biden and his family, with the tech companies another prominent target of their oversight efforts.
The White House criticized congressional Republicans for staging "a bizarre political stunt," hours after Biden's State of the Union address where he detailed the bipartisan progress made in his first two years in office.
"This appears to be the latest effort by the House Republican majority's most extreme MAGA members to question and relitigate the outcome of the 2020 election," White House spokesperson Ian Sams said in a statement Wednesday. "This is not what the American people want their leaders to work on."