Posted on November 29, 2018

Top House Committee Reviewing Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s Testimony for False Statements

Sean Davis, The Federalist, November 27, 2018

A top House committee that oversees the U.S. telecommunications industry is now reviewing whether Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey lied to Congress during a hearing about Twitter’s controversial history of arbitrarily censoring content published by the site, an aide for the House Energy and Commerce committee told The Federalist.

“The committee is aware of Twitter’s actions and is currently reviewing Mr. Dorsey’s testimony,” the aide said after Twitter suddenly banned Jesse Kelly, a Marine combat veteran, writer, and popular radio talk show host, without explanation.

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During testimony before the committee, which has broad authority to oversee and regulate telecommunications companies and social media publishers like Twitter, Dorsey repeatedly claimed that neither Twitter’s policies nor its algorithms took users’ political views into account when censoring content published by the site.

“I want to start by making something very clear,” Dorsey testified on September 5, 2018. “We don’t consider political viewpoints, perspectives, or party affiliation in any of our policies or enforcement decisions, period.”

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“We prohibit targeting individuals with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category,” Twitter’s policy states. “This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.”

“Deadnaming” is the use of an individual’s name on his or her original birth certificate that generally corresponds with the individual’s immutable biological sex, and “misgendering” is the accurate reference to an individual’s biological sex. Contrary to Dorsey’s claim before Congress that Twitter’s content and user censorship policies don’t take political viewpoints into account, a policy that discriminates against those who convey indisputably accurate scientific and historical information is by its very nature exclusively political.

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Twitter did not respond to inquiries from The Federalist about whether Dorsey planned to amend his false testimony, why the company had refused to provide answers to questions for the record from the House Energy and Commerce committee, and why it banned Kelly from the site.