Judging Freedom - Twitter Hearing - Twitter Executives & the FBI

Episode Date: February 8, 2023

Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. With courses available online 24-7 and monthly start dates, WGU offers maximum flexibility so you can focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu. Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, February 8th, 2023. It's about 4.50 in the afternoon here on the east coast of the United States. I'm in the middle of Manhattan on the top of a skyscraper because this is where I was when my producer found me and informed me about what was going on in the Twitter hearings on

Capitol Hill earlier today. So we already suspected that Twitter was doing the government's bidding, that is, when it suppressed information about Hunter Biden's laptop or when it promoted good tweets about Joe Biden, when it tried to make Donald Trump look ridiculous, sometimes with some help from Trump himself, when it was suppressing contrary voices on the significant dispute over COVID vaccines, was Twitter doing this on its own or did someone in the government ask them to do it? So the First Amendment only restrains the government. It says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. And when it was initially written, it only meant Congress. Today it means all government. So basically today it

would mean no government shall make any law abridging the freedom of speech. But Twitter is not the government. Twitter is a private entity like the New York Times or Fox News or MSNBC or CNN or the Washington Post. And just as those entities can post any editorial they want, any letter to the editor they want, and refuse to post any letter to the editor or editorial or op-ed that they want, Twitter can do the same. Facebook can do it. Any big tech can do it. They are a bulletin board. However, when the bulletin board does the government's bidding, when the government asks the bulletin board or demands of the bulletin board that it do for the government what the government can't do on its own, which is suppress

speech based on its content, then the bulletin board, Twitter, and the government can be, forgive me for covering my face, in a symbiotic relationship where each is helping the other and a federal judge can impose the restraints of the First Amendment on the bulletin board. So take a listen. This is Congresswoman Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, interrogating the former, she was fired when Elon Musk took over Twitter, the former general counsel of Twitter. Take a listen, particularly at the end of this, as to did anybody from the government ask you to do this? May I ask of you, where did you go to medical school? I did not go to medical school. That's what I thought. Why do you think you or anyone else at Twitter had the medical expertise to censor a doctor's expert opinion. Our policies

regarding COVID were designed to protect individuals. We were seeing you guys censored Harvard educated doctors, Stanford educated doctors, doctors that are educated in the best places in the world. And you silenced those voices. Did the U.S. government ever contact you or anyone at Twitter to pressure Twitter to moderate or censor certain tweets? We receive legal demands to remove content from the platform from the U.S. government and governments all around the world. Those are published on a third-party website, and anyone can review them. Thank God for Matt Taibbi. Thank God for Elon Musk for allowing to show us in the world that Twitter was basically a subsidiary of the FBI. See, this is what happens when you have politicians

asking questions. Professional lawyers and cross-examiners would say, oh, in the government, who demanded this in the government? Let me see a copy of the demand. And why did you comply with it? So look, this is the tip of the iceberg. We now know that Twitter and Facebook from time to time were doing the bidding of the government. We need to know who in the government. This is basically somebody in the Trump administration asking Twitter to suppress speech helpful to Trump and harmful to Joe Biden because they obviously wanted Joe Biden to defeat Donald Trump. The Q&A that you just saw had to do with suppressing the

opinions of doctors educated at Harvard Medical School and Stanford Medical School who were critical of the vaccine regimen. But the Q&A that we don't have time to show you goes to all kinds of other issues where people from the government, as yet unnamed, I'm dying to know who they are, asked Twitter to push up certain views and push down others. If Twitter did it on its own, it's free to do so. But when Twitter does the government's business, and if it does it on a regular, consistent, systematic basis, the people in the government should be exposed and Twitter should be exposed. Twitter, of course, has different management now, so there's nobody in Twitter to punish for this.

But a federal court will look at this very carefully the next time someone says my speech was suppressed by a private entity, but it was really by the government. Judge Napolitano, more as we get it for Judging Freedom. We'll see you next time. than you think by demonstrating mastery of the material you know. Make 2025 the year you focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu.