A report from congress has concluded that Jim Jordan and Elon Musk is weaponizing the government to silence critics.
One of the long-standing “grievances” (re: bullshit claims) by far right extremists is that they are constantly being silenced. Specifically, left leaning politicians (and that’s putting it loosely) somehow use government to silence anyone pushing these so-called “deeply held conservative beliefs”.
Pretty much every claim of the government somehow “colluding” with others, such as social media, didn’t go anywhere in the end. More often then not, it was a case of users harassing others and breaking the rules. When the book was rightfully thrown at them, those users scream “collusion” from the government and call it a “leftist” conspiracy to silence them. In fact, a study from last year confirmed this sort of thing where they found that far right users get moderated more because they break the rules more. This over top of additional research that shows that moderation on large social media platforms actually have a pro conservative bias. This is because if a left wing user breaks the rules a certain way, they tend to get punished more severely than a right wing user committing the exact same infraction.
For right wing conspiracy theorists, though, many point to the so-called “Twitter Files” as total proof that this conspiracy to silence them is really real for realsies. One of the things Elon Musk did when he bought Twitter was claim that he has undisputed proof that “the left” was colluding with social media to silence right wing users. Eventually, he released the “evidence” of this in the form of what he referred to as the “Twitter Files”.
Many people ended up pouring through the documents, in part, because of curiosity of what Musk was pointing to as “proof” of this. In the end, however, the whole thing ended up being a massive dud. At most, the government was basically flagging posts that could be a violation of the rules. Even then, more often then not, the platform would respond by simply refusing to act on some of those reports. While right wingers, while seemingly not actually reading the documents, held this up as undisputed proof of “collusion”, the general consensus was that the “Twitter Files” showed no such evidence of the claims of “leftist” “collusion”.
Nevertheless, that didn’t stop Musk from referring to himself as a “free speech absolutist” even though he was banning accounts of users he personally disagrees with. What’s more, he even took things to the next level by suing advertisers for failure to advertise on his platform. That lawsuit, unfortunately, managed to silence advertising advice organization, GARM.
All of this piles on evidence that when right wing extremists scream about “free speech”, very often, they really mean that they want to protect speech they personally agree with and silence those they disagree with. The Musk lawsuit against advertisers, put plainly, put that on full display.
Today, we are learning about a Congressional report looking at the activities of Musk and Republican, Jim Jordan. The report ultimately found, unsurprisingly, that the two are actively weaponizing the government to silence criticism. From TechDirt:
The report breaks down how this was a clear case of Jordan and Musk weaponizing the government to silence critical speech.
By March 2023, Twitter’s value had fallen from $44 billion to $20 billion. The reason for this decline in value is no mystery, given the facts outlined above. Nevertheless, the Majority launched an investigation into the advertisers which have declined to spend money on the platform, accusing them of “colluding” to hurt the company’s profits. Since then, the Majority has spent countless dollars and hours of staff time trying to figure out why advertisers might be hesitant to risk their brands’ reputations on a platform whose owner told them, in November 2023, to “Go fuck yourself.”
Chairman Jordan’s so-called investigation culminated in a July 2024 “interim report” which used cherry picked documents and misleading transcript excerpts to suggest that the committee had uncovered evidence of “collusion” when in fact the very opposite is true. In fact, the complete and contextualized documents and testimony show that the Global Alliance for Responsible Media and its member companies were engaged in a pro-competitive effort to address the substantial brand risk that harmful online content poses to advertisers and to consumers.
Chairman Jordan’s report had an audience of one: Elon Musk. In fact, the entire report seems like pretext for a lawsuit Musk filed against various advertising entities and ultimately to silence the advertisers who expressed concern about content on his platform. The resources of this Committee should not be directed to further pad a billionaire’s bottom line. In contrast, this minority report is intended for the American public, who are entitled to the truth about this investigation and about Chairman Jordan’s true aims and abuse of congressional oversight power.
It’s hard to imagine a more blatant example of a powerful government official abusing his authority to carry water for a political ally and major GOP donor. The fact that Jordan is doing this while sanctimoniously claiming to be fighting the “weaponization” of government is beyond parody.
As the report calls out:
For the past 20 months, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee has abused his oversight power and the rule of law to push an agenda that would pervert the free market and undermine individual companies’ independent decisions as to where to place advertisements online. The spread of illegal, harmful, abusive, and false and misleading content online results in actual harm, both online and offline. We are left to conclude that the Majority’s ultimate goal was not to conduct antitrust oversight as they claim, but rather to silence criticism of harmful online content and those who promote it, deter content moderation, and protect the ability to use mis- and disinformation campaigns to achieve political ends.
Ya think? This was obvious from the beginning, but almost entirely ignored by the credulous media that uncritically amplified Jordan’s false claims.
The report thoroughly debunks Jordan’s flimsy antitrust pretext and exposes his true aim: strong-arming companies into boosting Musk and his political allies.
It also calls out the irony of the committee that claims to be fighting weaponization, actually being the chief party weaponizing the government against speech:
The Majority is engaging in a transparently political effort to use the antitrust laws to benefit their allies by conferring upon them outcomes that they could not otherwise achieve in the marketplace. This is not just a misuse of the antitrust laws, but fundamentally subverts the goals of those laws. The irony could not be greater. While spending most of this Congress attacking the Biden administration’s so-called weaponization of government, the Majority here is trying to weaponize the antitrust laws under a highly dubious theory to override legitimate market outcomes.
It also calls out the MAGA trend of falsely claiming that content moderation or boycotts could possibly violate the First Amendment:
Finally, the Majority bandies about words like censorship, in a misguided effort to evoke the First Amendment. But as the Majority well knows, the First Amendment only applies to government action. And in this case, the only governmental burdening of speech is the Majority’s onslaught against GARM and its members. It is an effort to bully the advertisers into subsidizing firms whose content moderation policies put brands and businesses at risk. It is an attempt to hijack free speech, as well as antitrust, for political purposes.
If reality mattered, this report would be a bombshell. But, again, everyone seems to be living in a fog of nonsense, where anything the MAGA world says it’s doing, no matter how obviously false, is treated as genuine. And any time anyone calls out the lack of clothes on the emperor, it’s dismissed as sour grapes or “derangement syndrome.”
The report, to me, is unsurprising. We do live in a completely screwed up world these days because few bat an eye at the whole “it’s only OK when we do it” argument from right wing extremists. If right wing extremists silence speech, that’s OK because that’s the kind of speech that deserves to be silenced. If right wing extremists weaponize the government to go after people they disagree with, that’s OK because it’s all part of the plan to restore free speech. It’s pure and obvious hypocrisy at its core.
What’s more, Mike Masnick is right. I personally don’t really see any media coverage of this report either. Of course, there’s probably a pretty big reason for that: corporate ownership of the media outlets not wanting to upset Trump and his allies. Last week, we saw evidence of corporate ownership trying to steer clear of any speech that is critical of Trump and his allies when an editorial cartoonist for the Washington Post quit after the ownership silenced her cartoon being critical of Trump, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Walt Disney. The move was a follow-up of another wave of resignations from the Washington Post and political censorship was sparking controversy at the LA Times. In both instances, criticism of right wing politics was being censored by the ownership who cared more for trying to suck up to the incoming presidency than platforming voices of all political stripes.
So, the last thing the media types want to do is upset Trump by covering this Congressional report. After all, that would give Trump the sads and the last thing you want to do is give Trump the sads. After all, Trump and his inner circle has made no secret to how badly they want to crack down on journalism and free speech. This after Trump wanting to throw journalists in jail, revoking broadcast licenses of media outlets, kill journalism shield laws, threats against MSNBC and 404 Media, and even a lawsuit against a pollster for having the audacity of being wrong (calling it “election interference”). There’s no indication that Trump and his inner circle plans on stopping these threats to the media, in general, any time soon.
With that said, to me, the reports findings aren’t surprising. What’s more, the media’s response to the report (or rather, general lack thereof) is also not exactly surprising either given how things are unfolding. It leads me to believe that there is little reason for optimism moving forward – especially given Trump’s inauguration happening in a little over a week from now. I can only see things getting even worse.
