A Republican staff report released Tuesday recommends that Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook parent company Meta, be held in contempt of Congress over a February subpoena that required the company to provide information about its engagement with the executive branch and Meta’s “decisions and policies regarding content moderation.”
“Although directly responsive to the Committee’s subpoena, Meta has failed to produce nearly all of the relevant documents internal to the company,” the report states. “To date, Meta has produced only documents between Meta and external entities and a small subset of relevant internal documents.”
The resolution released Tuesday, if eventually approved by the full House, would send the committee report to federal prosecutors in Washington to review for potential criminal charges.
House Republicans have scrutinized the relationship between social media companies and the federal government because they contend certain platforms have mistreated conservatives over their views and violated First Amendment free speech protections.
The committee report states Meta demoted certain content, changed its policies to “accommodate” government demands and removed specific posts and accounts.
The report also contends Meta was the subject of bullying from the Biden administration.
The panel is pushing for the company’s internal records because they say it would provide insight into how the company “understood, evaluated, and responded to the Executive Branch’s requests or directives to censor content,” the report states. The documents would also provide a view into the company’s decision-making process to “censor viewpoints in the modern town square.”