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The Parliamentary committee investigating the January 6 U.S. Capitol attack announced that it issued subpoenas to four social media companies to testify. These companies are Alphabet-owned Google and YouTube and Meta, formerly Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter.
The House committee is tasked with looking into whether former U.S. President Donald Trump or those associated with him were involved in the attack on Capitol Hill carried out by his supporters. The committee said that it had decided to summon the officials of these four companies to testify before it.
The subpoenas issued by the committee follow these companies’ “inadequate” response to its request to reveal internal records indicating how they responded to calls for violence by extremist groups involved in the Capitol riots.
Two questions are of particular importance to the panelists: How did the spread of disinformation contribute to this attack? Have these social media platforms taken measures to prevent their platforms from becoming fertile grounds for extremism, and what are those measures?
It is “disappointing that after months of involvement, we still do not have the documents and information necessary to answer those basic questions,” said committee chair Thompson.
“We cannot allow our important work to be delayed any further,” Thompson stressed, urging companies to cooperate with the panel.
The committee wants Twitter, Trump’s preferred communication platform, to provide it with information regarding his supposed conversations “relevant to the planning and execution of the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol.” Committee members also confirmed that Twitter knew before the storming that there was a risk of violence that day.
YouTube, Meta, and Reddit denied the accusations leveled at them by the Select Committee regarding their alleged lack of cooperation in the investigation. They also confirmed that they were cooperating to provide the committee with the required information, adding that they have enforced strict policies “in the run-up to January 6 and continue to do so today.”
Translated by Ahmed N. A. Almassri
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