(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The House Judiciary Committee is set to consider a resolution on Thursday that would hold Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress over his apparent refusal to provide information about Facebook censorship.
The committee released a report on Tuesday, explaining its reasons for the upcoming vote. According to the report, Zuckerberg has refused to comply with a subpoena for the committee’s investigation into social media censorship.
The Committee’s subpoena to Meta, issued on February 15, 2023, requires, among other things, that Meta produce material concerning its engagement with the Executive Branch and Meta’s decisions and policies regarding content moderation, the committee said in its report.
“To date, Meta has produced only documents between Meta and external entities and a small subset of relevant internal documents,” the committee added.
“The Committee has a particular need for Meta’s internal documents, which would shed light on how Meta understood, evaluated, and responded to the Executive Branch’s requests or directives to censor content, as well as Meta’s decision-making process to censor viewpoints in the modern town square.”
If the House were to hold Zuckerberg in contempt, the Justice Department would decide whether to prosecute him.
Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Meta, said the company has delivered more than 50,000 pages of both internal and external documents to the committee since February. He added that they also have made current and former employees available for interviews with lawmakers.
“For many months, Meta has operated in good faith with this committee’s sweeping requests for information,” Stone said in a statement.
But in an article earlier this month, Fox Business cited an anonymous source, who said that none of the documents include the specified internal communications the committee is seeking.
The committee is also seeking documents about Meta’s new social media platform, Threads. Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, wrote a letter to inform Meta on July 17 that the subpoena covers the company’s new Twitter-like social media platform.
“In addition, please treat these discovery obligations as ongoing and applicable to any information generated after receipt of this letter,” he said. “Furthermore, this letter serves as a formal request to preserve all existing and future records and materials relating to the Threads platform and related topics addressed in this letter.”
Fox Business noted that the last person to be held in contempt of Congress was former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows over his defiance of a January 6 Committee subpoena. The Justice Department declined to press charges in that matter.
