US House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan on Wednesday issued subpoenas to the chief executives of a number of the tech business’s greatest corporations as Republicans on the committee press considerations over content material moderation and free-speech points.
The letters (PDF) demand that Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella give up paperwork associated to communications between the businesses and the Biden administration. Republican lawmakers have accused the businesses of colluding to suppress conservative voices on their platforms, a declare the businesses have denied.
“To develop efficient laws, such because the potential enactment of latest statutory limits on the manager department’s means to work with huge tech to limit the circulation of content material and deplatform customers, the Committee on the Judiciary should first perceive how and to what extent the manager department coerced and colluded with corporations and different intermediaries to censor speech,” mentioned Jordan’s letters to the CEOs.
Jordan, a Republican from Ohio, turned chairman of the Judiciary committee final month after the GOP took management of the House, a place that features the ability to difficulty subpoenas. Jordan’s letters positioned a March 23 deadline for the businesses to show over the paperwork.
Jordan steered within the letters Wednesday that Twitter CEO Elon Musk was exempted from the subpoenas as a result of the corporate “just lately set a benchmark for the way clear Big Tech corporations might be about interactions with authorities over censorship” by way of its launch of the interior communications dubbed the Twitter Files, which mentioned the platform’s choice to restrict the attain of a New York Post article about President Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, forward of the 2020 election.
A Microsoft spokesperson mentioned it had “began producing paperwork, are engaged with the committee, and dedicated to working in good religion.”
Neither Alphabet, Apple nor Facebook instantly responded to a request for remark.