Are social media companies censoring conservative speech?

On February 8, House Republicans questioned former Twitter executives about what they believe were corporate efforts to silence the right-wing and conservative opinions on the social media platform.

The hearing was motivated by Twitter temporarily blocking a New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop contents close to the 2020 election, a decision that former executives labeled as a mistake.

After Elon Musk bought Twitter, he released a selection of documents that disclosed the internal discussion that led to blocking the Hunter Biden story. He called them the "Twitter files."

Musk was highly involved in the hearing. According to CNN, he traveled to Capitol Hill and met with House Republicans before the hearing. James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, said he even offered tips on lines of questioning.

Republican representatives were sure, despite the constant denying of Twitter execs and no objective evidence, that the documents showed the company's "collusion" with the FBI and White House to censor right-wing accounts.

On that same day, a Rolling Stone exclusive unveiled that the social media company routinely receives requests to block or delete posts from influential Republicans and Democrats alike, as former administration officials and Twitter employees told the magazine.

Among the influential voices were also officials from Trump's White House. During the hearing, Anika Collier Navaroli, a former Twitter executive, told the representatives that the past administration asked them to remove a tweet from model Chrissy Teigen.

Navaroli also revealed that the company changed its rules to accommodate Trump's tweets which would have been labeled as violating the platform's policies.

The core debate that Republicans and Democrats face is how much should social media companies get involved in the content that is published on their platforms. How much does freedom of speech protect disinformation or hate?

These questions could be answered legally. The attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, both Republicans, have sued the White House for "forcing the platforms to stifle the voices of its political critics in violation of the constitutional guarantee of free speech," as reported by The New York Times.

What this legal action show is how the issue divides Republicans and Democrats. According to a Pew Research center study, the support for labeling posts when inaccurate or misinformed is completely partisan: 71% of republican leaning adults disapprove, while 73% democrat leaning adults approve.

The Pew study also showed that the majority (60%) of conservatives and Republicans do not trust social media companies to determine which posts should be labeled as inaccurate.

But the question is still in place. Does social media limit conservative speech? Some data from a 2021 study conducted by Twitter in Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States contradicts this notion.

Twitter concluded that when studying all content as a group, in all countries but Germany, "tweets posted by accounts from the political right receive more algorithmic amplification" than the political left.

Still, most Americans believe that social media limits political speech in general. According to another Pew study, 73% of all adults think companies are at least likely to censor political viewpoints. 90% of Republicans hold this view.

Americans also think that social media has negatively affected democracy. More than 70% of Republicans and 57% of Democrats say it is bad for democracy.