This morning, the CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Twitter testified before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. The Republican senators in the hearing highlighted the big technology companies' censorship of conservative speech, particularly the recent actions of Twitter and Facebook to suppress the story regarding Hunter Biden's international exploits. All three will return (virtually) to the Senate on November 17 for a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

On Wednesday, the New York Post published an article about emails obtained from a laptop abandoned by Hunter Biden at a repair shop that confirm some of the accusations regarding impropriety in Hunter Biden's position on the board of Burisma and former Vice President Biden's involvement. This might have been a story that only made an impression with the devoted MAGA crowd, except that Twitter decided it violated a policy against "hacked materials," blocked users from tweeting the article, and suspended accounts that had posted it, including the accounts of White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, the Trump campaign's account (@TeamTrump), and the New York Post itself. This policy was not applied to the New York Times story from a few weeks ago that published information from President Trump's tax returns that had been obtained not just through irregular channels but illegally. Facebook quickly followed suit to suppress the story, and the mainstream media completely ignored that the story had been published.

Yesterday, Twitter announced that it would not carry any political ads (broadly defined to include issue ads as in the Honest Ads Act/SHIELD Act) on its platform.  Under current law, this is perfectly permissible.  It contrasts with the approach taken by Facebook, which announced recently that it would not decide truth and falsity in political ads.  Democrats and the mainstream media were quick to praise the decision:

2019 Republican Lawyer of the Year, former FEC Chair, and RNLA Board of Governors member Lee Goodman appeared on CNBC earlier this week to discuss the unsuccessful effort by the Biden campaign to have Facebook remove a Trump campaign ad it claimed was inaccurate.  Mr. Goodman summarized the law applicable to campaign ads:

RNLA Vice President for Communications Harmeet Dhillon wrote today about Twitter's ban of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's campaign account and how it is only the latest example of big technology companies' bias against conservatives and Republicans.  His account was reinstated today, after having been banned all week:

But this victory by the most powerful Republican in Congress is an exception to the censorship suffered by many others as a result of Big Tech’s anti-conservative bias and increasingly brazen interference in the political arena, which pose serious threats to our democracy.

Today, Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified before the House Judiciary Committee amid allegations of anti-conservative bias and privacy violations on the platform. Chairman Bob Goodlatte began the investigatory hearing on “Transparency & Accountability: Examining Google and its Data Collection, Use, and Filtering Practices” by making several remarks.