National

Republicans on the House Oversight Committee are asking former Twitter employees to testify at a February hearing on the social media platform's handling of reporting on Hunter Biden, Axios has learned. 

Why it matters: This first move while in the majority is an indication of the committee's priorities — even as it launches an investigation into the classified documents found at the Penn Biden Center. 

Driving the news: House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.)  sent letters Wednesday to several former Twitter executives who were involved in the decision to suppress the New York Post’s reporting about Hunter Biden.

The Twitter employees were asked to testify at a hearing planned for the week of Feb. 6, and to respond no later than next Wednesday, Jan 18.

Comer also renewed his request to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen for the department to produce “suspicious activity reports”  — generated by banks and forwarded to the Treasury Department — that involve Hunter Biden and some other associates. 

"During the 117th Congress, the Department of the Treasury refused our requests. ... The Committee requests these SARs and other information," Comer wrote. 

The big picture: House Republicans on the committee in the prior Congress had already signaled a wide range of probes spanning the Afghanistan withdrawal, COVID origins, domestic energy production and infrastructure spending. 

But because oversight requests don't carry over from Congress to Congress, all of those letters and requests for documents and testimony need to be re-sent by Republicans now that they are in the majority. 

What they're saying: “The American people must know the extent of Joe Biden’s involvement in his family’s shady business deals and if these deals threaten national security and his decision-making as president," Comer said in a statement. 

White House Counsel Dick Sauber told Comer and House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) in December that oversight demands made by congressional Republicans during the last Congress would have to be renewed. 

Thought bubble from Axios' Ashley Gold: Comer's moves are just one of many to come from House Republicans who feel empowered to go after tech platforms for alleged censorship without Democrats at the helm of the chamber. 

We're likely to see a lot more of these types of requests and similar hearings to what was seen during the Trump administration.

House Republicans target Twitter's handling of Hunter Biden story

Comer's moves are just one of many to come from House Republicans.

Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images

House GOP investigations

Big Tech

President Biden has made the COVID-19 crisis and a post-Trump return to national unity and traditional democratic ideals his top priorities. From vaccinations to stimulus to schools, Biden is seeking bipartisan compromise while showing a willingness to use executive authority and bare Democratic majorities in the U.S. House and Senate to implement his policies. Republican leaders are navigating deep party divisions over if and how to move beyond former President Trump.

Politics & Policy

From the Valley to D.C., Big Tech players like Facebook, Google and Amazon are under more scrutiny than ever as new technology develops and privacy and antitrust concerns grow in lockstep with companies’ ambitions.

Technology

New fines levied by European regulators against Meta and Apple are the latest reminder that Big Tech companies must now maneuver between two wildly different regimes in the U.S. and the EU.

Why it matters: These firms must navigate conflicting laws, mounting fines and a growing wariness of their business models on both sides of the Atlantic.

The big picture: Companies are fighting off attempts to change the rulebook in the U.S. while figuring out how to toe the harder lines in Europe and the United Kingdom, which is also developing its own rules.

Driving the news: Companies have racked up billions in fines over the past 10 years, and there's no sign that will slow down. 

On Wednesday Ireland's Data Protection Commission fined Meta $414 million for violating General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules in how it obtains users' consent to ad personalization. Meta said it plans to appeal the decision.

"It would be highly unusual for a social media service not to be tailored to the individual user," Meta said. "We strongly believe our approach respects GDPR, and we're therefore disappointed by these decisions and intend to appeal both the substance of the rulings and the fines."

Also on Wednesday, France fined Apple $8.5 million over the use of personalized advertising on iPhones, saying the firm's practices violated the French Data Protection Act.

What they're saying: European officials say if the companies want to do business in the EU, they must keep up with the laws.

"We have European legislation that says, as a platform providing services you need to set up a system so that you can actually implement our national rules on your platform," Margrethe Vestager, Europe's competition commissioner, said at an event in Washington last December. 

"Those are the rules that we fly by, and they are for everyone."

How it works: Although tech's big five companies — Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft — are all U.S.-based, they're motivated to operate globally to reach as many customers and advertisers as possible. 

But the rules in Europe and elsewhere are much stricter than those in the U.S., despite increasingly aggressive efforts by some regulators and states to sharpen American laws.

Details: GDPR was Europe's first major tech policy package, and as companies have tried to comply with its privacy requirements, they've run into hefty fines. Last year the EU added two new sweeping competition and content rules, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act. 

Both laws went into force last November, and companies are trying to figure out their exact obligations before they're subject to penalties.

The DMA lays out obligations and punishments for digital service "gatekeepers" who break the law's rules for promoting competition. The DSA puts more responsibility on large platforms to police and take down illegal content, with fines if they fail to comply.

The intrigue: In some cases, U.S. companies have had to make changes to business models or product design to comply with European law, resulting in significant differences between the products or services deployed on either side of the Atlantic. 

For example, Amazon last December agreed to change some business practices around the way merchants can advertise their products on the Amazon website.

Congress last year failed to pass a bill that would have required Amazon to adopt similar practices in the U.S.

In other cases, differing rules in the U.S. and the EU mean that an online platform's policies might be merely controversial in one region but outright illegal in the other.

Some experts have flagged Twitter's push to relax content rules under Elon Musk as likely to run afoul of EU regulators, who have reminded Musk that "the bird will fly by our rules" in Europe.

The other side: In the U.S., Biden administration regulators at the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department, along with lawmakers from both parties in Congress and in many states, have all sought to heighten pressure on tech giants.

But partisan divides, a more business-friendly culture and costly lobbying efforts by affected companies have so far limited those efforts here.

Meanwhile, the EU has woven a blanket of complex laws that tech firms must scramble to comply with — or keep paying out big penalties.  

Yes, but: The EU bureaucracy moves slowly, and each enforcement process can take years.

Meta's new $414 million fine stems from a proceeding that began in 2018. 

Tech giants face alternate universes across the Atlantic

Firms are facing vastly different regulatory regimes in the U.S. and the tougher EU, which keeps piling on fines.

Illustration of a cursor patterned with the US flag pointing away from a cursor patterned with the EU flag

Europe

Meta fined over $400 million for its targeted ad practices

The ruling came after a pair of 2018 complaints alleged Meta did not properly comply with EU law.

The Meta (formerly Facebook) logo marks the entrance of their corporate headquarters in Menlo Park, California on November 09, 2022

The Meta logo at the entrance of their corporate headquarters. Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images

Meta (company)

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is personally taking control of Google's A.I. strategy, the New York Times reports. 

The big picture: The release of ChatGPT three weeks ago led Google management to declare a "code red," per the Times.

Why it matters: The chatbot answers queries in simple text, rather than with a list of links. That could disrupt search as surely as smartphones displaced landlines. 

What's happening: Pichai has "upended the work of numerous groups inside the company to respond to the threat that ChatGPT poses," the Times writes.

Employees are racing to build "A.I. products that can create artwork and other images, like OpenAI’s DALL-E technology."

Google CEO taking charge of company's A.I. strategy

The release three weeks ago of ChatGPT led Google management to declare a "code red."

Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Google

Automation and AI

Media Trends

Axios Media Trends

The suspension of several journalists on Twitter Thursday immediately set off a  firestorm, with mainstream press crying foul over what they perceived as an attempt by Elon Musk to silence his critics and right-wing voices arguing that the liberal media finally got a taste of its own medicine.

Why it matters: Musk has said repeatedly that he stands for free speech, but the inconsistency of his content moderation decisions has begun to alienate traditional media outlets.

What they're saying: "The suspension of (Washington Post reporter) Drew Harwell's Twitter account directly undermines Elon Musk's claim that he intends to run Twitter as a platform dedicated to free speech," said Sally Buzbee, executive editor of The Washington Post.

CNN said in a statement it will "reevaluate" its relationship with Twitter based on Musk's response to questions from CNN about why one of its reporters' accounts was suspended.

The other side: "TABLES HAVE TURNED: Elon Musk suspends CNN, NYT, WaPo journalists, reminding them the rules also apply to them," Fox News tweeted.

"Oh so now you care about censorship and having your Twitter accounts banned?" tweeted conservative activist Charlie Kirk, founder and president of Turning Point USA.

Between the lines: Musk later confirmed that reporters were suspended for linking to a Mastodon account that actively tracked Musk's private jet. Musk suspended a similar Twitter account on Wednesday.

He alleged that by posting links to the account, those journalists had "doxxed" him, and doxxing is a violation of Twitter's policies.

Doxxing is typically defined as publishing private or personally identifying information about someone online, often for the purpose of inviting scrutiny or harm to the subject.

Musk later joined a Twitter Spaces audio discussion among journalists, including some of those who were banned, where he doubled down on his decision.

In that discussion, the Post's Harwell disputed the notion that linking to the jet account — which aggregates publicly available location information — constituted "doxxing," and reiterated that he never posted Musk's address.

In response, Musk repeated that doxxing is against Twitter's rules and violators of those rules would be suspended. He then abruptly exited the audio event, which had roughly 31,000 listeners.

Be smart: Regardless of how they were perceived, the suspensions on Thursday were unprecedented.

There's never been an attempt by a major social media platform to suspend so many journalists all at once.

The Committee to Protect Journalists said that if the reporters' suspensions are confirmed as retaliation for their work, "this would be a serious violation of journalists' right to report the news without fear of reprisal."

The big picture: Musk's long-held frustration with the mainstream media has put him at odds with one of Twitter's most active user groups.

When asked about the role that the traditional press should play on Twitter, Musk has said that he believes in "citizen journalism" as a way to counter the mainstream media's power.

"I'm not saying we should somehow downplay the major publications or prominent journalists. I'm simply saying we should elevate people and give voice to the people. Much more, " he said on a Twitter Spaces chat last month.

Twitter press suspensions become media flashpoint

Musk's content moderation decisions have begun to alienate traditional outlets.

Illustration of a bird cage with the Twitter logo inside being held up by a cage carrier in the shape of Elon Musk's face.

Twitter

A series of Twitter accounts belonging to journalists who cover Elon Musk and Twitter were suspended without notice on Thursday.

Why it matters: Musk has vowed to make Twitter a haven for "healthy, functioning free speech." He tweeted in April, "I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means."

Details: The following accounts were suspended on Thursday night:

Washington Post tech reporter Drew Harwell

CNN politics and tech correspondent Donie O'Sullivan

Sports and political commentator Keith Olbermann

Voice of America's chief national correspondent Steve Herman

State of play: The notice that appears on the now-suspended accounts reads: "Twitter suspends accounts that violate the Twitter Rules."

Many of these reporters' last tweets or stories focused on Musk and Twitter.

In response to a tweet about the suspensions, Musk indicated that the accounts violated Twitter's doxxing policy, which he revealed Wednesday after suspending an account that actively tracked his private jet.

Several of the suspended journalists' accounts had allegedly tweeted links to the jet tracker. "Same doxxing rules apply to 'journalists' as to everyone else," Musk tweeted.

"Accounts engaged in doxxing receive a temporary 7 day suspension," he said.

What they're saying: "The impulsive and unjustified suspensions of a number of reporters, including CNN's Donie O'Sullivan, is concerning but not surprising," CNN said in a statement. "Twitter's increasing instability and volatility should be of incredible concern to everyone who uses the platform. We have asked Twitter for an explanation, and we will reevaluate our relationship based on that response."

The Washington Post's executive editor Sally Buzbee in a statement called for Harwell's Twitter account to be "reinstated immediately," saying his suspension "directly undermines Elon Musk's claim that he intends to run Twitter as a platform dedicated to free speech."

"Harwell was banished from Twitter without warning, process or explanation, following the publication of his accurate reporting about Musk," Buzbee added.

A New York Times spokesperson called the suspensions "questionable and unfortunate."

"Neither The Times nor Ryan have received any explanation about why this occurred," the spokesperson said in a statement. "We hope that all of the journalists' accounts are reinstated and that Twitter provides a satisfying explanation for this action."

When asked about the suspension, Mac pointed to his creation of a new Twitter account under the name "Silenced Ryan Mac," where he said he was given no warning.

Rupar wrote on Substack Thursday night, "I have no idea what rules I purportedly broke. I haven’t heard anything from Twitter at all."

He noted that he tweeted Wednesday about the ElonJet account that was suspended from Twitter. But Rupar added, "I still don't know what policy that could’ve possibly violated."

Axios has contacted the other reporters and/or representatives of their news organizations for comment.

Worth noting: Twitter also suspended Mastodon's account on Thursday after the latter tweeted a link to the jet tracking account on its own platform, TechCrunch reports.

Be smart: It's unclear how long these suspensions will last. Musk has said he does not believe in permanently banning accounts.

The big picture: Musk has been pushing for free speech-first Twitter since he offered to buy the company, saying he is "against censorship that goes far beyond the law."

"If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect," he tweeted in April. "Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people."

“If it's a gray area, I would say let the tweet exist," Musk later said at the TED2022 conference in April. "In a case where there's perhaps a lot of controversy, you don't necessarily promote that tweet."

He wrote in an October note to advertisers that Twitter would not become a "free-for-all hellscape" but emphasized the importance of having a "wide range of beliefs."

Editor's note: This is a breaking news story. Please check back for updates.

Elon Musk's Twitter suspends several journalists' accounts without notice

Musk previously vowed to make Twitter a haven for "healthy, functioning free speech."

Elon Musk talks to the press at the construction site of a new Tesla Gigafactory on Sept. 3, 2020 near Gruenheide, Germany. Photo: Maja Hitij via Getty Images

Elon Musk

Media

After a record economic expansion, the coronavirus pandemic sent the U.S. economy into a recession as unemployment soared to staggering heights. The country now faces urgent questions about how much stimulus is needed for reeling consumers and businesses, and what a recovery might look like.

Economy & Business

Twitter disbanded its "Trust and Safety Council," according to an email sent Monday night to the members of the panel that was obtained by news outlets including Axios.

Why it matters: It's another example of owner Elon Musk rolling back years of efforts designed to make the social media site a more civil and safer place, per the Washington Post.

Context: The council comprised dozens of expert advisory groups volunteering since 2016 to address what the since-deleted page described as "issues critical to the health of the public conversation."

Their key focus areas were online safety and harassment, human and digital rights, suicide prevention and mental health, child sexual exploitation and dehumanization.

Members of the group included GLAAD, the Human Rights Foundation, the Samaritans, the International Network Against Cyberhate and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

Council member Alex Holmes noted in a tweet Monday night that the group of volunteers was at no point responsible for decision-making on the platform.

Driving the news: "As Twitter moves into a new phase, we are reevaluating how best to bring external insights into our product and policy development work," the company said in the email thanking the volunteers for their work.

"As part of this process, we have decided that the Trust and Safety Council is not the best structure to do this," added the email, signed only "Twitter."

"Our work to make Twitter a safe, informative place will be moving faster and more aggressively than ever before and we will continue to welcome your ideas going forward about how to achieve this goal," it read.

Of note: Twitter canceled a meeting with the volunteers before sending the email, per a tweet from Holmes, deputy CEO of nonprofit The Diana Award.

Holmes said that over the past week "several members of council have had their personal safety and well-being impacted by the actions of Twitter staff."

What they're saying: "Twitter has made it abundantly clear that trust and safety are no longer priorities for the company, given this abrupt dismissal of the Trust & Safety Council as well as its dangerous policy choices over the last month and invitations for suspended accounts to rejoin," a GLAAD spokesperson told Axios. 

"Until the company returns to following basic industry-wide best practices on hateful content, the platform clearly remains unsafe not only for LGBTQ users but for brands and advertisers."

The Committee to Protect Journalists, a nonprofit that promotes press freedom worldwide, and another council member said the action was a cause for "grave concern, particularly as it is coupled with increasingly hostile statements by Twitter owner Elon Musk about journalists and the media."

The big picture: Musk has committed to making Twitter a haven for free speech, but he has also said the removal of child sexual abuse material is his "number one priority." 

The company has lost roughly two thirds of its staff since Musk took over, including many employees who worked on trust and safety and related areas.

Flashback: Three members of the council resigned last week in protest at the Twitter changes, citing in a statement evidence they said showed that "contrary to claims by Elon Musk, the safety and wellbeing of Twitter's users are on the decline."

Musk responded by tweeting "It is a crime that they refused to take action on child exploitation for years!" — prompting Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey to call Musk's claim "false."

Go deeper: Elon Musk's Twitter sees rise in racial slurs, hate speech -

Editor's note: This article has been updated with additional details throughout.

Twitter disbands Trust and Safety Council

Three council members resigned last week, citing safety concerns since Elon Musk took over Twitter.

Elon Musk and a Twitter logo are seen in this illustration photo in Warsaw, Poland on 30 November, 2022. 

An illustration of Elon Musk and a Twitter logo. Photo:STR/NurPhoto via Getty Images

2022 saw an unprecedented rise in labor organizing in U.S. tech firms, with some workers pushing for collective rights just as a tanking economy changed the industry's dynamics.

Yes, but: So far, tech's labor activism has largely moved on the margins of the industry, with Amazon warehouse workers, Apple Store employees and video game QA testers leading organizing efforts, while engineers, product teams and other headquarters staff mostly shied away.

The staff at a Staten Island Amazon warehouse in April voted to form the retail giant’s first union in the U.S. after workers voted against unionization last year in Alabama.

In May, a second Staten Island warehouse voted to reject a union, and an upstate New York warehouse did the same in October. But new efforts continue to pop up, most recently in North Carolina and Kentucky.

Workers at several Apple Stores voted to unionize this year, including at Apple’s flagship store in New York City's Grand Central Terminal in April, a store in Maryland in June and a store in Oklahoma City in October. 

A retail store in Atlanta canceled a vote to unionize with workers there reportedly saying they felt intimidated, and last week the National Labor Relations Board accused Apple of using union-busting tactics at the location.

Collective action pressure within the video game industry has been building for years, with workers citing punishing schedules and hostile work environments. 2022 saw the first U.S. union formed in a big game publisher.

Raven Software, owned by Activision Blizzard, unionized in May after the NLRB ruled against an Activision Blizzard challenge to the vote. Testers at Activision Blizzard Albany unionized this month.

Between the lines: Those moves mean that Microsoft, which still hopes to close its acquisition of Activision  Blizzard despite regulatory challenges, will soon become a union employer.

In June, Microsoft announced it had reached a "neutrality pact" with the union that has organized Activision workers and pledged not to interfere with unionization drives. 

Last week, hundreds of workers in the ZeniMax Studio Group, which Microsoft purchased for $7.5 billion in 2020, announced they were taking steps to vote on unionization.

“We remain committed to providing employees with an opportunity to freely and fairly make choices about their workplace representation,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Axios.

Zoom out: Tech’s outburst of organizing overcame decades of Silicon Valley  resistance to labor unions.

The industry rose in the '80s and '90s in an era dominated by free-market ideas. Most tech leaders and many workers saw unions as a relic of the analog past, a drag on the economy and a constraint on their flexibility and efficiency.

The tech industry operates under an implicit bargain with skilled workers: They get stock option ownership and high pay in return for keeping the workplace union-free. 

Today, however, the wider public has warmed to unions. 

An August 2022 Gallup poll found that U.S. approval of labor unions is at its highest point since 1965.

At the same time, the pull of the tech-firm stock-option magnet has weakened, at least briefly, as the industry faces its worst downturn in two decades.

What they’re saying: “The rate of organizing and the significance of the wins that we're seeing is like nothing I've experienced in my lifetime,” Sara Steffens, secretary-treasurer of the Communications Workers of America, which has been involved in several tech organization efforts, told Axios.

Steffens attributed 2022's rise in tech unions to pandemic-driven cultural shifts and long- germinating efforts to organize.

“When you have a QA tester who's just killing themselves at crunch time, really taking on a crazy amount of work and all the health burdens that go along with that, they can understand that they're being exploited,” Steffens said.

Amazon, Apple, Activision Blizzard and the NLRB declined to comment for this story.

Steffens praised Microsoft's approach as “showing the other tech companies that there's a different way to do this, besides digging in and fighting — that you could actually support your workers rights to make this decision on their own through an orderly process.”

“I think that people will see that it's turned out to be a really good thing business-wise for Microsoft.”

What's next: Negotiating contracts amid layoffs

Tech's labor organizing is still in its infancy. 

Only a few unions have successfully formed, and most of those still face the often-arduous process of negotiating contracts with employers.

Pandemic-driven labor shortages gave workers an unusual boost in leverage for a time, but that dynamic could change again as the economy slows down.

The tech industry laid off over 120,000 employees in 2022.

The bottom line: Steffens predicts that the “exponential” momentum built in 2022 will continue in 2023.

The year labor organizing came to tech

But unions had their greatest wins on the industry's fringes, in Amazon warehouses, Apple stores and game studios..

Illustration of a dialogue box that reads "unionize" with a cursor aiming for the ok button

Labor unions

Google must delete search results about people in Europe if they can prove that the information is clearly incorrect, the EU's highest court said on Thursday.

Driving the news: The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled that search engines must "dereference information found in the referenced content where the person requesting dereferencing proves that such information is manifestly inaccurate."

Context: A 2014 EU ruling granted European citizens the right to ask search engines to remove sensitive or outdated information from listings about their past, known as the "right to be forgotten."

Google must remove inaccurate search data if asked, EU court rules

Such proof doesn't need to "result from a judicial decision," the court said.

All Big Tech stories