Mar 13, 2023
The three-hour hearing showed that corporate-government collusion goes far deeper than the major platforms in Silicon Valley. The Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government held its second hearing Thursday with a focus on the "Twitter Files" that exposed corporate-government collusion in Twitter's censorship regime. But the three-hour hearing showed the public-private partnership goes far deeper than the major platforms operating out of Silicon Valley. Lawmakers heard testimony from independent Substack journalists Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, two of the primary reporters who published the series after Elon Musk took over the platform. The pair shared how the federal government uses private tech companies as conduits to regulate speech. "We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation requests from every corner of government, from the FBI, the DHS, the HHS, DoD, the Global En
