Twitter Execs Get Grilled!

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Last week, Twitter was receiving the brunt of congressional questioning and investigation. House Republicans summoned four former Twitter executives to an investigative hearing on February 8th, where they accused Twitter of colluding with the Federal Government to censor conservative voices on the app (Bond 2023). Immediately after Former President Trump's term, people like Trump himself, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Green, and others found their Twitter accounts were receiving much less attention or were completely removed from the Social Media site. Many conservatives concluded that this was a personal attack to help "woke-leftist" rhetoric flourish on Twitter instead. 
Truthfully, it was discovered that each of those banned or shadow-banned had violated Twitter policy. Twitter had even modified its policy to accommodate some of Trump's hateful and inflammatory speech, but they suspended his account indefinitely after the January 6th attack (Darcy 2023). Most of the others banned from the site either incited violence, spread COVID-19 misinformation, or violated Twitter's civic integrity policy that condemns election denying (Ballotpedia 2023). 
Democrats also took the opportunity to question the former Twitter executives about the lack of initiative to crack down on their policy violations when it comes to national elected officials. AOC, the prominent congresswoman from last week's article, called out the former executives for changing the rules to keep the former president's account up- which they admitted to during previous questioning. Twitter's "incitement of violence" policy had also not been approved in time to prevent the January 6th Insurrection, spurred by tweets from Trump. Former executive Navaroli admitted that Twitter could have prevented such a large-scale invasion of the Capitol if it had censored this tweet (Broadwater and Conger 2023). 
Now Twitter has been bought out by Elon Musk, who has immediately reinstated accounts like these upon obtaining the company. Elon Musk has elected to make major Twitter decisions using the app's polling function, by which he typically abides. Musk is also a known supporter of individuals like Kanye West, who has been banned from platforms for antisemitic remarks. It will be interesting to see what role Twitter has to play in the political game as the next general election comes up in just two years. 

https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/08/media/republicans-hearing-twitter-bias-reliable-sources/index.html
https://ballotpedia.org/Elected_officials_suspended_or_banned_from_social_media_platforms
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/us/politics/twitter-congressional-hearing.html
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/08/1155491204/ex-twitter-officials-reject-gop-claims-of-government-collusion

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