The Republican Party had long been looking forward to the House Oversight Committee hearing on the Hunter Biden laptop story and Twitter, Reuters reports.
They wanted to show Democrats conspiring with rascally Twitter employees, suppressing stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop, and suppressing conservatives in general.
The hearing backfired.
At a combative day-long hearing before the House of Representatives Oversight Committee, Republicans claimed that Twitter cooperated with government officials and the news media to suppress a New York Post article on the laptop’s contents, two weeks ahead of Biden’s 2020 election victory over former President Trump, a Republican.
The whole point of the hearing was to explore the extent to which Democrats pressured Twitter to suppress content from conservatives.
Turns out, it was Republicans who demanded Twitter take down tweets they didn’t like, MSNBC reports.
The committee’s witnesses, three former Twitter executives, said in subpoenaed testimony that they mistakenly believed the Post article contained hacked material and reversed their decision to limit its circulation on the social media platform within 24 hours.
The House Republicans’ hearing on Twitter’s “role in suppressing the Biden laptop story” took some unexpected twists Wednesday — including one witness testifying that the White House had requested the platform remove a Chrissy Teigen tweet insulting then-President Donald Trump.
If anything, Twitter bent over backward to accommodate Trump.
Former Twitter employees acknowledged that Trump published racist content that ran afoul of the company’s standards and policies, so Twitter altered its standards and policies to accommodate the Republican’s offensive content.
Republicans wanted to prove that if the story about the Hunter Biden laptop had garnered more traction on Twitter, Trump would have won the 2020 election.
Former Twitter employees confirmed that the FBI did not direct the social media company to block a New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s laptop, despite Republican claims to the contrary.
In fact, the article did not circulate more because no one seemed that interested in it.
Political experts have gaffed at how the Republican Party is now claiming that Trump would have won the election if this story was bigger — first of all, finally that the GOP is admitting Trump did lose the election. And second of all, it’s now the fault for this article’s sad performance.
This hearing was months in the making. And rather than provide the smoking gun Republicans wanted, it turned the tables on the GOP.
Experts say the hearing did real damage to Trump and his party’s cause.
GOP members had plenty of time to get ready for this “historic event,” but they nevertheless showed up unprepared and were caught flat-footed when the hearing produced the opposite of the intended evidence.
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