The FTC’s dishonest tactics against Elon Musk
Hudson Crozier
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Elon Musk angered more than just “blue check” liberal pundits when he took over Twitter last year. His imperfect but meaningful struggle to make it a place for freedom of expression has earned him endless wrath from the political establishment.
That includes President Joe Biden’s Federal Trade Commission, which quickly opened an investigation into Twitter’s protection of user data after the takeover. Musk’s legal team has released a court filing detailing its corrupt strategy to tear down the company.
TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY, OR THE MINORITY OF ONE
An employee at the consulting firm Ernst and Young testified that the FTC pressured employees to write a negative analysis of Twitter’s data security methods. Bureaucrats made it clear that smearing Musk would be the predetermined outcome of the report, he said. The employee feared that the FTC would make “challenges” for the company if it refused to write it.
Ironically, he made these statements during a deposition that was supposed to help the government’s case. He resisted the FTC’s attempts to downplay these bullying tactics through its line of questioning. “This is absolutely what you will do, and this is going to occur, and you’ll produce a report at the end of the day,” he said while describing the agency’s aggression. He has no known reason to lie under oath about these interactions.
FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan, a Biden appointee, told lawmakers Thursday that there was no vendetta here. Demanding every internal communication about a company’s new owner is just a matter of holding corporations accountable, she said. But the FTC’s mask fell off when it demanded the names of every journalist involved in the reporting of the “Twitter Files.” Musk’s lawful sharing of internal materials with these reporters revealed the government’s role in Big Tech censorship. The FTC cannot pretend as if targeting them has anything to do with ensuring user data privacy.
The Biden administration, including the president himself, and the Democrats have expressed outrage that Musk’s rollback of censorship protocols has enabled “misinformation” and given their political opponents more of a voice. They can’t stand that he took one of the government’s censorship tools away and exposed what it had done with it, prompting scrutiny from Congress and the public. The FTC is the enforcement arm of this shameless retaliation, and it’s safe to add it to the list of politicized federal agencies.
People tend to call anything they don’t like “fascist.” These efforts to subjugate the private sector for the government’s political ends come dangerously close to fitting the description.
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Hudson Crozier is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.