Comments
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee joined Maria Bartiromo today on Sunday Morning Futures.
During their discussion the topic of Twitter censorship of conservatives, also known as shadow-banning, came up.
Twitter is targeting pro-Trump Republican lawmakers Matt Gaetz, Devin Nunes, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan and John Ratcliffe with the same shadowbanning technique.
Nunes said the House is looking at legal remedies to deal with Twitter’s censorship of conservative voices.
Rep. Devin Nunes: I don’t know what Twitter’s up to. It sure looks to me like they are censoring people. And they ought to stop it. And we are looking at any legal remedies that we can go through.
Devin Nunes looking at 'legal remedies' to take against Twitter for 'shadow banning'
Rep. Devin Nunes said he is looking at possible legal action against Twitter over the "shadow banning" fiasco that temporarily decreased the visibility he and other Republicans had on the social media platform.
Last week, Vice News reported that Nunes, along with several other conservative Republican figures, were harder to find on Twitter as their accounts did not show up on the auto-populated drop-down search box.
"It sure looks to me like they are censoring people and they ought to stop it. We are looking at any legal remedies to go through," Nunes, R-Calif., said at the end of a Sunday morning interview on Fox News.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Nunes' comments follow a tweet by President Trump saying "We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once!"
Those GOP individuals who were effected by the "shadow banning" debacle didn't completely disappear from Twitter — their profiles did appear when a full search was conducted — but they did express ire at what they said could be a politically charged maneuver to make it less convenient for users to find them. These GOP figures — Nunes, along with Reps. Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, and Mark Meadows, as well as Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel — felt the impact along with controversial right-wing figures, including Jason Kessler, the organizer of last year's white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va.
Meanwhile, their Democratic counterparts did not experience the same issue, the Vice News assessment claimed.
Twitter asserted that "shadow banning" is not something the company does, and in a blog post attributed what happened to being an "issue" that was resolved on Wednesday. Twitter also claimed that some Democratic politicians were effected, but did not identify any, and suggested that the GOP problem "had more to do with how other people were interacting with these representatives’ accounts than the accounts themselves."
Nunes isn't the only Republican taking a stand against the social networking giant. Gaetz announced last week on Fox News that he filed a Federal Election Commission complaint against Twitter because his account didn't appear in auto-complete search results. "Congressman Gaetz continues to believe that interactive computer services, such as Twitter, should not discriminate against content while simultaneously asserting that they are a nonbiased public forum under federal law," a spokesperson for Gaetz told Breitbart News.
Nunes said the issue of his visibility on Twitter had been a monthslong problem.
"For several months people have been contacting me saying, 'I tried to find you on Twitter. I couldn't find your account, why is that?'" he said Sunday.
Nunes, who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has repeatedly condemned Twitter for applying a layer of censorship on the tweets tied to the Drudge Report, tying the issue to the larger issue of censorship and bias conservatives face in the technology arena.