In remarks to reporters on Thursday, Senator Cruz said that the Senate Judiciary Committee wants to know "what the hell is going on".
"And the Committee today will be noticing a markup on Tuesday to issue a subpoena to Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee next Friday - to come before this Committee and the American people and explain why Twitter is abusing their corporate power to silence the press and to cover up allegations of corruption".
Facebook and Twitter have been preventing users, including White House officials and Senator Cruz himself, from sharing a New York Post article on Hunter Biden’s business dealings abroad, possibly involving his father, former US Vice President Joe Biden.
Unbelievable. Yesterday, @twitter blocks links to @nypost story alleging Joe Biden corruption on China.
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) October 15, 2020
TODAY, blocking links to ANOTHER NYPost story alleging Hunter Biden sold access to communist China for millions. I just tried to share that story. Here’s Twitter’s response 👇 pic.twitter.com/NZpw4gmcb2
On Wednesday, the New York Post published two letters of Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma, to Hunter Biden. In one of the letters, Pozharskyi thanked him for organising a meeting with his father, while in the other one the representative of the Ukrainian company asked Biden Jr to think how he could use his influence to support the company. If true, these letters contradict Joe Biden's statements that he had nothing to do with his son's cooperation with Burisma.
Biden's campaign has denied that any such meeting took place, as have several of his former top advisers.
"We have seen Big Tech, we have seen Twitter and Facebook actively interfering in this election in a way that has no precedent in the history of our country", Cruz said. "Never before have we seen active censorship of a major press publication with serious allegations of corruption of one of the two candidates for President".
see you soon, @jack. pic.twitter.com/USyi7LAC7u
— Senate Republicans (@SenateGOP) October 14, 2020
President Donald Trump also took to Twitter to praise the newspaper for covering the supposed corruption dealings of Hunter Biden and shared a couple of tweets suggesting that Twitter is directly interfering in the 2020 election to aid its preferred candidate.
Congratulations to the @nypost for having exposed the massive corruption surrounding Sleepy Joe Biden and our Country. He’s always been a corrupt politician. Disgraceful!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 15, 2020
Shortly after the @Facebook Communications director admitted they were shadow banning today's Biden exposé, @Twitter has now completely blocked the story from their platform.
— Steven Crowder (@scrowder) October 14, 2020
Big Tech is trying to steal an election. pic.twitter.com/WDMHdW8g61
Facebook explained its decision by saying it needed to carry out additional fact-checking procedures. Twitter said that the publication of the New York Post contradicted the privacy policy of the social network.
In the House of Representatives, controlled by the Democrats, Republican members of the Oversight Committee on Thursday called on their Democratic colleagues to hold a similar emergency hearing on "Big Tech's censorship and election interference".
