As the new administration is preparing to take over in the US, the speaker of the House of Representatives is working to ensure that the Biden-Harris administration doesn’t take evidence of the censorship collusion with Big Tech with it when it leaves.
Speaker Mike Johnson and a group of prominent Republican members of the House and committee chiefs have penned a letter to Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su, recalling that during the transition of power, the Federal Records Act and other relevant rules, in terms of record retention, must be complied with.
We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.
The signatories “expressly direct” Su to make sure her own department’s records are preserved as well.
The letter goes on to explain that House committees have conducted “robust oversight” related to a number of key and contentious issues and mention the outgoing government’s censorship collusion with social platforms as one of these.
The Congress that is about to finish its term will continue to work to secure compliance with “many subpoenas with which you largely declined to cooperate,” Speaker Johnson and his colleagues note.
At the same time, they add that the incoming Congress and its committees will continue with the oversight, and decide if some of the subpoenas need to be reissued.
As for Johnson himself, his efforts around supporting free speech and exposing violations undermining it – that was happening during the Biden-Harris administration – have been praised by free speech groups.
Johnson this week secured his party’s support, which has the majority in the House, to continue as speaker for another two years.
Among the efforts of the previous Congress to shed light on suspected government violations of freedom of expression is the House Judiciary Committee Staff report titled, “The Censorship Industrial Complex: How Top Biden While House Officials Coerced Big Tech to Censor Americans, True Information and Critics of the Biden Administration,” issued in May, and cited in the letter now sent to Acting Labor Secretary Su.
Recently, lawsuits, including Murthy v. Missouri, but also the release of Twitter and Facebook Files, offered an unprecedented glimpse into the mechanics behind the mass-scale online censorship in the US.
