Press Releases

Today, Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) calling on him to open an investigation into inaccurate information about the upcoming presidential election being propagated by Grok, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot on X. Specifically, Grok incorrectly told users that Vice President Kamala Harris had missed the ballot deadlines in nine states and suggested that she was ineligible to appear on the presidential ballot in the 2024 election.

Given Chairman Jordan's extensive focus on allegations of censorship on social media this Congress, Ranking Member Nadler urged Chairman Jordan to continue fighting against political discrimination on platforms by investigating this matter. Chairman Jordan's silence on this matter follows X's actions to stop disinformation against Republican officials on its platform that have not been similarly applied to Democratic officials. 

In the letter, Ranking Member Nadler writes, in part:

"...X does take action against disinformation about Republican officials on its platform. Recently, posts containing fake images that purported to show X’s internal software code falsely claimed that some X users, including Elon Musk, former President Trump, and other conservatives, were exempted from policies against using racial slurs on the platform. According to media reports, an account that posted the fake code images was suspended within hours, and, by the next day, the inauthentic images were tagged with warning labels about manipulated media. X confirmed that multiple accounts were suspended for sharing the false images. These examples raise concern that X’s policies about manipulated media are enforced with partisan bias.

Additionally, X appears to censor accounts for partisan gain. Recent reports have surfaced that X took unwarranted action against the group White Dudes for Harris (@dudes4harris) shortly after they hosted a successful fundraising event where almost 200,000 people donated over $4 million for Vice President Harris. The X handle @dudes4harris was suspended because of a “user report” for “violating our rules against evading suspension,” though the exact violations or reasons behind the suspension are unclear, and the account was reinstated the next day. According to the group, less than a week after the questionable suspension, the @dudes4harris account was “labeled … as spam” and “falsely accus[ed] … of manipulating the platform,” which lead to the account’s reach being limited. In the recent past, prominent journalists with left-leaning accounts have been “accidently” suspended, raising eyebrows to the platform’s selective enforcement against voices Mr. Musk disagrees with. In sum, I lack confidence that Mr. Musk (with his self-proclaimed expansive view on free speech) will take the same swift action against false election information about liberals as he does when it targets conservatives. As Washington Post editorial columnist Molly Roberts aptly stated in a recent opinion piece: “Sometimes it’s easy to forget that Twitter isn’t Twitter anymore. Until Elon Musk, or his invisible hand, comes along and reminds us.”

Ranking Member Nadler continued:

“Your chairmanship of this Committee has made your views crystal clear that any content moderation is egregious censorship that is “devastating” to the American people. You believe, for example, that “much needless pain and suffering could have been avoided” had social media companies not moderated harmful conspiracy theories and falsehoods surrounding COVID-19 and vaccines. You have also investigated and attacked government agencies, such as the FBI, for simply sharing information with social media platforms about foreign malign actors, such as Russia, when they deliberately meddle with elections. It appears that in your expansive view, the American public is better served if it receives every conceivable piece of information—regardless of whether content is deceptive or harmful to a platform’s users or democratic elections at large.

While we may have significant disagreement over the degree and extent of content moderation, I hope that we can at least agree that enforcement on a major platform like X should be fair to both sides. At a basic level, a platform’s policies should be applied in an even-handed manner free from political bias. The “modern town squares” of American discourse are not well served if a platform throttles or suspends liberal points of view yet allows right-wing disinformation to run rampant. If you truly believe that platforms should allow for the unfettered free and fair exchange of ideas, I urge you to join me in ensuring that X does not pay lip service to principles that it does not follow in practice."

The full letter can be found here.