The Senate Judiciary Committee will vote to subpoena Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey after the social media platform blocked a story about allegations of corruption surrounding Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
“We are going to proceed Tuesday,” committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, told reporters Thursday.
Twitter yesterday blocked a New York Post story about emails that were allegedly discovered on a laptop that belonged to the Democratic presidential nominee’s son, Hunter Biden. Among other things, the report alleges that he set up a meeting between then-Vice President Joe Biden and a senior official from the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma.
After the story began circulating across social media, Twitter and Facebook blocked others from posting the story. Twitter blocked posts that linked to the story and briefly locked the New York Post out of its account. Facebook reduced the distribution of the story and said that the story would be fact-checked by a third party.
Twitter also suspended Trump’s campaign Twitter feed, @TeamTrump, after it posted a video calling Biden “a liar who has been ripping off our country for years, as it relates to the @nypost article,” the campaign’s social media director, Mike Hahn, tweeted.
Twitter also blocked Senate Judiciary Committee member Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, from circulating the New York Post stories.
“This is election interference, and we’re 19 days out from an election,” he said. “It has no precedent in the history of democracy. The Senate Judiciary Committee wants to know what the hell is going on.”
