In a dramatic move, House Republicans are planning to cite Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of social media giant Facebook, for contempt of Congress.
The decision comes after months of investigation into whether or not the company has been coordinating with the White House to censor users on their platform in violation of First Amendment rights.
Fox News correspondent Hillary Vaughn reported on this news and provided an update on what’s next for both sides.
The investigation began back in February when the House Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena for documents related to how Facebook handles censorship issues.
After several attempts to obtain these documents, the committee determined that what they had received was insufficient and have now decided to move forward with citing Zuckerberg for contempt.
According to information obtained from sources on the committee, they need access to 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 matters decision making process to censor viewpoints…”
Despite providing over 53,000 pages of documents thus far and making multiple employees available for questioning, Facebook has still failed to meet all requirements set forth by the committee.
If found guilty of contempt charges, Zuckerberg could face up a year in jail.
However it is highly unlikely that either DOJ or U.S Attorney would pursue prosecution of such charges against him.
In response to this looming hearing, Facebook released a statement saying that they have been actively providing documents since before even receiving the initial subpoena back in February as well as continue making employees available for questioning even through this week.
They also went on record stating that they believe they have met all requirements asked of them by Congress thus far and will continue cooperating with investigators during this ongoing inquiry into how their platform handles censoring users’ First Amendment rights online.
