Former Twitter executives conceded Wednesday they made a mistake by blocking a story about Hunter Biden, the son of U.S. President Joe Biden, from the social media platform in the run-up to the 2020 election, but adamantly denied Republican assertions they were pressured by Democrats and law enforcement to suppress the story.
"The decisions here aren't straightforward, and hindsight is 20/20," Yoel Roth, Twitter's former head of trust and safety, testified to Congress. "It isn't obvious what the right response is to a suspected, but not confirmed, cyberattack by another government on a presidential election."
He added, "Twitter erred in this case because we wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2016."
The three former executives appeared before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee to testify for the first time about the company's decision to initially block from Twitter a New York Post article in October 2020 about the contents of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden.
Emboldened by Twitter's new leadership in billionaire Elon Musk — whom they see as more sympathetic to conservatives than the company's previous leadership — Republicans used the hearing to push a long-standing and unproven theory that social media companies including Twitter are biased against them.
Committee Chairman Representative James Comer said the hearing is the panel's "first step in examining the coordination between the federal government and Big Tech to restrict protected speech and interfere in the democratic process."
Alleged political bias
The hearing continues a yearslong trend of Republican leaders calling tech company leaders to testify about alleged political bias. Democrats, meanwhile, have pressed the companies on the spread of hate speech and misinformation on their platforms.
The witnesses Republicans subpoenaed were Roth, Vijaya Gadde, Twitter's former chief legal officer ..
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