The intertwining of Twitter and government agencies didn't happen overnight; it's been a "slow creep" for years, Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., told Newsmax.
The collusion, as Johnson termed it, appears to have begun during the 2016 election cycle, he said Thursday on "The Record With Greta Van Susteren."
"Initially, it looked like they rationalized their decisions to sort of collude — I hate to use the word, but that's what it was — to collude with the social media platforms because they wanted to try to prevent Russian disinformation," he said. "We know all of that was a big hoax anyway."
It was then used to try to impeach President Donald Trump, he said, "but it creeped. It grew from there. And they began to rationalize this behavior, and it became more and more pervasive."
By the time the 2020 election cycle came around and again in the 2020 midterms, "they were leaning on Twitter to censor and silence and turn down the volume effectively of the voices on the conservative side of the spectrum."
Republican candidates and people who wanted to talk about issues that were "controversial and outside of the left narrative on, you know, the efficacy of vaccines, for example, and the origin of the COVID virus. They turn those things down, and so they basically put themselves in the place of being the arbiters of what is acceptable and true speech."
Johnson is a member of the newly formed House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which heard testimony Thursday from two journalists who exposed government and political interference at Twitter in the Twitter Files reports.
"In our constitutional system," Johnson said, "the government does not have that place. They don't get to determine what speech is acceptable, but that's what was happening."
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