Newly discovered emails show how social media sites contributed to the decline of Arizona from a reliable red state into a hotbed of leftist legislators.
A nonprofit organization called The Arizona Capitol Oversight published emails on August 10 showing how Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs used Twitter and Facebook to restrict her top rivals in advance of her heated race for governor of Arizona in 2022 when she was the state’s secretary of state. The damaging assessment claims that Hobbs tried to “improve her political posture” before the 2022 election. In one of the emails, dated November 12, 2020, Hobbs complained that she was attacked following the rediscovery of a 2017 tweet in which she compared Trump supporters to “neo-Nazis,” and she asked one social media network for special protection.
The emails show that Twitter responded to Hobbs’ hissy fit that Twitter was not protecting her sufficiently by requesting her to produce additional proof of her claims. In his reply, Hobbs said, “I am not sure I can provide the information you are asking for because I reported and then blocked multiple users at the same time.” As if that weren’t enough, Hobbs then turned her censorship requests against Facebook, asking the social media platform to delete an unrelated post by email on November 23, 2021. The post in question was about the elections in Arizona.
From November 2020 until her official declaration of her gubernatorial campaign, there was censorship collaboration. Notably, Hobbs used her official government email to persuade Twitter to suppress tweets that contained so-called misinformation in one damaging email sent just weeks before she made her statement.
The Arizona House of Representatives, which is presently governed by Republicans, opened an investigation in response to the damaging emails. According to the Arizona Capitol Times, Republican House Speaker Ben Toma of Arizona has initiated a fresh investigation through an Ad Hoc Committee on Oversight, Accountability, and Big Tech. Nearly nine months after Republicans initially started looking into Hobbs’ email, a fresh inquiry has been launched. According to The Capitol Times, in December 2021, former GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward requested that then-Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich look into whether Hobbs had broken any laws by using her position of authority to pressure Twitter to take down content.
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