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Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, center, and ranking member Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y. , the House Judiciary Committee hearing on “Special Counsel John Durham’s Report,” is held in the Rayburn Building on Wednesday, June 21, 2023.
Tom Williams | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images
asked House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to deliver documents about content moderation on Topics in response to an earlier subpoena related to the committee’s ongoing investigation of tech platform policies and contact with the Biden administration.
The letter, obtained exclusively by CNBC, is an early indication of the added spotlight the Meta’s latest product could bring to the company in Washington. Threads competes directly with Twitter, which owner Elon Musk wants to shape with the declared tyranny of free speech in mind, though users including journalists sometimes comment.
While Meta executives have made it clear that they don’t want news and politics to dominate the conversation over topics, this is a big part of what users have historically come to Twitter to discuss. The more this becomes the case on threads, the more likely they are to be caught in the political crossfire.
In fact, the threads raise serious and specific concerns because they have been marketed as competition for Elon
Twitter Musk, who has been politically persecuted by the next Biden administration
“Musk’s commitment to freedom of expression,” Jordan wrote, referring to A Wall Street Journal article that found that the FTC required Twitter to turn over internal communications about Musk and identify journalists who were allowed access to the company’s records, as part of an investigation into whether Twitter could still adequately protect consumer information.
“By contrast, there are reports that Threads will enforce Instagram’s Community Guidelines, which has modified legal rhetoric after pressure from the government,” Jordan wrote. He pointed to a recent lawsuit against the Biden administration filed by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana that alleged that the federal government had suppressed speech through its efforts to get social media platforms to crack down on what they deemed harmful posts related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Or elections, for example.
On July 4, a Louisiana federal judge partially granted A.J Preliminary injunction In that lawsuit that barred several Biden administration officials from meeting with social media companies to encourage them to remove or delete posts. It also prohibited these officials from even reporting certain types of corporate social media posts to encourage their removal or suppress them.
In the wake of the ruling, the State Department canceled a regular meeting with Facebook about the 2024 election and hacking threats, a person at the company said. Washington Post. On Friday, the Court of Appeals agreed to put a file on hold Pause On the initial injunction, which means the government’s takedown of social media posts can be appealed until the court hears the case again.
Jordan wrote that the subpoena issued by the committee on February 15, which was sent to AmazonAnd appleAnd Googleand Meta and Microsoft, “persistent in nature”, meaning that it also applies to threads even though it was launched quite recently. He said the new letter serves as a formal notice to preserve relevant current and future documentation about the threads and asked Meta to submit documents related to the topics content oversight and discussions with the Biden administration by the end of the month.
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Read the letter House Chief Justice Jim Jordan sent to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg here:
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