A House hearing Thursday featuring Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. brought the complicated debate about balancing free speech with fighting misinformation to center stage.
Some of the debate played out in real time among members of Congress and the hearing witness.
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The House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing on censorship started with some early demonstrations of the partisan divide on the issue.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) made a motion to move the committee into executive session — closing the hearing to the public — over concerns about Kennedy’s recent statement on COVID-19.
She argued that testimony from Kennedy, who said in a video published by the New York Post that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jewish and Chinese people, could “defame” or “degrade” people.
Republicans successfully blocked that motion.
Ranking member Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-Virgin Islands) also raised concerns with the committee giving Kennedy 10 minutes to deliver his opening statement instead of the usual 5 minutes allotted to witnesses.
“If you want to cut him off and censor him some more, you’re welcome to do it,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said, eliciting laughs in the room.
Kennedy’s extensive history of sharing anti-vaccine views online was the center of Thursday’s debate over how social media companies moderate content.
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Before his recent comments suggesting COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted,” the long-shot presidential candidate spread vaccine-skeptical content on his social media accounts.
Kennedy faced suspensions and removal of content in line with companies’ policies.
Kennedy said during the hearing that he has “never been anti-vax,” even though he has frequently been critical of vaccines and shared debunked claims about links to autism.
“I’m subjected to this new form of censorship, which is called targeted propaganda, where people apply pejoratives like ‘anti-vax.’ I’ve never been anti-vaccine,” Kennedy said.
“But everybody in this room probably believes that I have been because that’s the prevailing narrative.”
Democrats slammed Kennedy for his role in boosting Republicans’ allegations that companies are censoring content with a political bias.
“No matter what you may think, Mr. Kennedy — and I revere your name — you’re not here to propound your case for censorship. You are here for cynical reasons, to be used politically by that side of the aisle to embarrass the current president of the United States,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) said.
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“You’re an enabler in that effort today. And it brings shame on a storied name that I revere. I began my political interest in your father. And it makes me profoundly sad to see where we have descended today in this hearing,” Connolly added.
Along with Kennedy, Republicans featured testimony from former New York Post editor Emma-Jo Morris. She testified about when social media platforms suppressed the outlet’s October 2020 story about the contents of a hard drive copied from a laptop that Hunter Biden, the president’s son, purportedly left at a Delaware repair shop.
Morris laughed when she addressed a news story that said more than 50 former intelligence officials had said the story had hallmarks of Russian disinformation. She noted that the contents of the hard drive were later authenticated by other news organizations.
Jordan took particular issue with government officials communicating with social media companies about potential election-related misinformation and influencing the platforms’ enforcement actions.
“After being repeatedly told a hack-and-leak Russian info operation is coming for a whole year, it arrives on October 14th in the form of Ms. Morris’s story — an accurate story,” Jordan said.
“Our government knows the laptop is real; it’s not a Russian information op, and they know this story is true, but when directly asked, they say no comment,” he continued.
House Republicans also used a federal judge’s decision earlier this month in Missouri v. Biden to limit the Biden administration’s communications with social media companies as ammunition for their allegations of online companies censoring conservative voices online.
Along with Kennedy, lawmakers heard testimony from Louisiana Department of Justice Special Assistant Attorney General D. John Sauer, a lawyer involved in the case.
Last week a three-judge appeals court panel issued a brief pause on the lower court’s ruling limiting the Biden administration’s communications with social media companies.
Maya Wiley, the president and CEO at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, questioned why the House Republicans are trying to make it “more difficult for companies to keep racist, antisemitic, and scientifically baseless conspiracy theories off their platforms.”
“The cesspool of bigotry on social media has fueled a sharp rise in hate-motivated violence,” she testified during the hearing.
She also called out the decision by U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, to limit the Biden administration’s communication with social media platforms.
“The federal district court’s opinion was so flawed that the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of appeals reversed the ruling and vacated the preliminary injunction,” Wiley said.
“That said, despite the policies these platforms claim to have, we have tracked a systematic failure to enforce them. And as detailed in my written statement, the platforms are in fact cutting staff in this area,” she added.
Democrats said the GOP is using the allegations of censorship to limit tech companies from moderating “harmful” content that helps Republicans politically.
“MAGA Republicans are trying to scare social media companies into not taking down blatantly false information in the lead-up to our 2024 presidential election. Chair Jordan knows as we do that when conspiracy theories succeed, so does Donald Trump,” Plaskett said.
But Republicans countered that Democrats were simply afraid of the information that GOP investigations were uncovering.
“It’s really ironic this hearing is covering the left’s censorship of opposing viewpoints. You’ve all seen it on display all day long,” Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) said. “They’ve been trying to bully and defame our witnesses and try to cover up their opinions.”