Jim Jordan Weaponizes The Subcommittee On The Weaponization Of The Gov’t To Intimidate Researchers & Chill Speech
As soon as it was announced, we warned that the new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government," (which Kevin McCarthy agreed to support to convince some Republicans to support his speakership bid) was going to be not just a clown show, but one that would, itself, be weaponized to suppress speech (the very thing it claimed it would be investigating.")
To date, the subcommittee, led by Jim Jordan, has lived down to its expectations, hosting nonsense hearings in which Republicans on the subcommittee accidentally destroy their own talking points and reveal themselves to be laughably clueless.
Anyway, it's now gone up a notch beyond just performative beclowing to active maliciousness.
This week, Jordan sent information requests to Stanford University, the University of Washington, Clemson University and the German Marshall Fund, demanding they reveal a bunch of internal information, that serves no purpose other than to intimidate and suppress speech. You know, the very thing that Jim Jordan pretends his committee is investigating."
House Republicans have sent letters to at least three universities and a think tank requesting a broad range of documents related to what it says are the institutions' contributions to the Biden administration's censorship regime."
As we were just discussing, the subcommittee seems taken in by Matt Taibbi's analysis of what he's seen in the Twitter files, despite nearly every one of his reports" on them containing glaring, ridiculous factual errors that a high school newspaper reporter would likely catch. I mean, here he claims that the Disinformation Governance Board" (an operation we mocked for the abject failure of the administration in how it rolled out an idea it never adequately explained) was somehow replaced" by Stanford University's Election Integrity Project.
Except the Disinformation Governance Board was announced, and then disbanded, in April and May of 2022. The Election Integrity Partnership was very, very publicly announced in July of 2020. Now, I might not be as decorated a journalist as Matt Taibbi, but I can count on my fingers to realize that 2022 comes after 2020.
Look, I know that time has no meaning since the pandemic began. And that journalists sometimes make mistakes (we all do!), but time is, you know, not that complicated. Unless you're so bought into the story you want to tell you just misunderstand basically every last detail.
The problem, though, goes beyond just getting simple facts wrong (and the list of simple facts that Taibbi gets wrong is incredibly long). It's that he gets the less simple, more nuanced facts, even more wrong. Taibbi still can't seem to wrap his head around the idea that this is how free speech and the marketplace of ideas actually works. Private companies get to decide the rules for how anyone gets to use their platform. Other people get to express their opinions on how those rules are written and enforced.
As we keep noting, the big revelations so far (if you read the actual documents in the Twitter Files, and not Taibbi's bizarrely disconnected-from-what-he's-commenting-on commentary), is that Twitter's Trust and Safety team was... surprisingly (almost boringly) competent. I expected way more awful things to come out in the Twitter Files. I expected dirt. Awful dirt. Embarrassing dirt. Because every company of any significant size has that. They do stupid things for stupid fucking reasons, and bend over backwards to please certain constituents.
But... outside of a few tiny dumb decisions, Twitter's team has seemed... remarkably competent. They put in place rules. If people bent the rules, they debated how to handle it. They sometimes made mistakes, but seemed to have careful, logical debates over how to handle those things. They did hear from outside parties, including academic researchers, NGOs, and government folks, but they seemed quite likely to mock/ignore those who were full of shit (in a manner that pretty much any internal group would do). It's shockingly normal.
I've spent years talking to insiders working on trust and safety teams at big, medium, and small companies. And, nothing that's come out is even remotely surprising, except maybe how utterly non-controversial Twitter's handling of these things was. There's literally less to comment on then I expected. Nearly every other company would have a lot more dirt.
Still, Jordan and friends seem driven by the same motivation as Taibbi, and they're willing to do exactly the things that they claim they're trying to stop: using the power of the government to send threatening intimidation letters that are clearly designed to chill academic inquiry into the flow of information across the internet.
By demanding that these academic institutions turn over all sorts of documents and private communications, Jordan must know that he's effectively chilling the speech of not just them, but any academic institution or civil society organization that wants to study how false information (sometimes deliberately pushed by political allies of Jim Jordan) flow across the internet.
It's almost (almost!) as if Jordan wants to use the power of his position as the head of this subcommittee... to create a stifling, speech-suppressing, chilling effect on academic researchers engaged in a well-established field of study.
Can't wait to read Matt Taibbi's report on this sort of chilling abuse by the federal government. It'll be a real banger, I'm sure. I just hope he uses some of the new Substack revenue he's made from an increase in subscribers to hire a fact checker who knows how linear time works.