‘Did You Approve Hidden State Censorship?’: Musk Calls Out Schiff Over Twitter Files Revelations

‘Did You Approve Hidden State Censorship?’: Musk Calls Out Schiff Over Twitter Files Revelations

Elon Musk called out Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California Tuesday, demanding to know if he approved “hidden state censorship” while chairing the House Intelligence Committee following the latest revelations from the Twitter files, a series of internal documents from the company.

“As (outgoing) Chair of House Intelligence, did you approve hidden state censorship in direct violation of the Constitution of the United States @RepAdamSchiff?” Musk tweeted Tuesday, days after Schiff threatened to repeal protections provided by Section 230 if tech companies didn’t censor enough. “We should absolutely take aim at that and other anti-competitive actions of Big Tech, and I think we’ve got a big problem right now with social media companies and their failure to moderate content and the explosion of hate on Twitter, the banning of journalists on Twitter,” Schiff said during a Sunday appearance on “State of the Union” hosted by Jake Tapper. Musk’s tweet came the day after independent journalist Michael Shellenberger reported that the FBI paid Twitter about $3.5 million between October 2019 and February 2021 to reimburse expenses from complying with various requests. Shellenberger and journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss published a series of reports on Twitter’s censorship based the files since Dec. 2.

Musk fired James Baker, a former FBI lawyer who approved surveillance on Trump campaign aide Carter Page based on the since-discredited Steele Dossier, who formerly worked at Twitter, after the release of the first batch of documents regarding the censorship of an October 2020 report by the New York Post about the contents of a laptop abandoned by Hunter Biden. Prior to calling Schiff out, Musk called the revelations in Shellenberger’s thread “extremely problematic.”

Schiff did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.