As he called the House Judiciary Committee into session on a cold and snowy February day in Washington, DC, Chairman Jim Jordan was ready to take a victory lap. American free speech had been critically threatened, and now it was saved — in large part thanks to him and his committee.
“What a difference a few years make,” the Republican congressman for Ohio’s 4th district told those present. “Four years ago, President Trump was banned from all platforms: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube. Today, he has his own platform. He’s back on all the others. And of course, he’s president of the United States.”
Donald Trump was expelled from the major social networks in the final days of his first presidency, following the January 6th insurrection. Tens of thousands of his supporters were banned, too, for pushing the QAnon conspiracy theory or supporting the violent overthrow of the US government.
To those who had sounded the alarm on disinformation and radicalization online, these bans were a belated victory of sorts — after what they had warned of had come to pass. To Trump and his supporters, they were the ultimate proof that liberals sought to censor conservatives online.
Jordan was a leader of the Republican effort to fight back against this “censorship,” bringing the resources of the House Judiciary Committee — and its subpoena powers — to bear for the cause since 2023. His opening remarks on that day were anything but bluster. Over that time, he had racked up win after win against what had become known as a “Censorship-Industrial Complex” — the title of the day’s evidence session.
Big tech had been censoring Americans on the orders of the White House, he told the room. “You don’t have to take my word for it. Mark Zuckerberg wrote the committee a letter, told us it was going on.” He had — and a few months later, shortly before Trump’s second inauguration, Zuckerberg promised to swap sides in the censorship wars, abolishing Facebook’s use of fact-checkers and changing its global moderation rules to allow more widespread use of ethnic and anti-LGBTQ slurs, among other changes.
The committee had notched up no shortage of smaller victories along the way, which Jordan relayed with relish. His committee had helped to shut down academic units, NGOs, and coalitions of advertisers. All of them were now “out of business.” “What a difference a few years can make,” Jordan said, satisfied.
The day’s star witness was Matt Taibbi, an independent journalist and onetime liberal darling, who had been among those people handpicked by Elon Musk to publish revelations from the so-called Twitter Files, exposing — as they saw it — how concerns about “misinformation” had been exploited to censor conservative and dissenting voices on the platform.
Taibbi and company were calling for the government to do more in the name of free speech — defunding any efforts funding fact-checkers or misinformation research, and similarly ending US government funding of media across the world, which they dismiss as “propaganda.” Over the last few years, Musk, Jordan, and Taibbi had created something of an unstoppable machine: Jordan had the power to subpoena evidence, call witnesses, and create reports. Taibbi and others could testify at those hearings and report on them, as well as on material provided by Musk. Musk, in turn, could launch lawsuits based on the findings of Jordan’s committees and on the reporting of Taibbi and others.
To those people caught in that machine, though, things looked very different. From their perspective, they had been trying to protect America’s free speech. During the heights of covid, false information that stopped people from getting vaccinated or from masking, or which made them try unsafe “cures,” could prove fatal. The January 6th protests showed that political misinformation could be a life-and-death matter, too.
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