The House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan today issued subpoenas to the chief executives of the five largest tech companies to talk about content moderation methods and possible censorship on their platforms.

A group of congressional Republicans led by Jordan (pictured) wants to grill Meta Platforms Inc., Google LLC, Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc. executives over the possibility that their companies have at times colluded with the U.S. government to suppress free speech, especially where divisive issues are concerned.

This comes after the new owner of Twitter Inc., Elon Musk, had journalists go through Twitter’s communications in what has become known as the “Twitter Files.” The files show that government agencies requested Twitter moderate their platform the way the agencies thought was necessary, although whether that’s censorship is up for debate. Since then, some politicians, mostly from the right, and some members of the public have aired concerns about government overreach. Notably, Twitter has not been called to meet with the committee.

The panel will ask Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Andy Jassy, Satya Nadella and Tim Cook “how and to what extent” their companies interacted with the federal government to take down particular posts, perhaps related to divisive issues such as the COVID-19 pandemic or Hunter Biden’s now infamous laptop. Republicans have often said that Big Tech harbors an anti-conservative bias.

Those companies will be asked if they “restrict the circulation of content and deplatform users.” Jordan said Twitter will be absent from the meeting because it “set a benchmark for how transparent Big Tech companies can be about interactions with government over censorship,” adding that the Twitter Files expose the “weaponization of the federal government’s power to censor speech online.”

Some of the companies have already issued responses. A spokesperson for Microsoft said the company is “engaged with the committee and committed to working in good faith.” Meta said it is currently “producing documents in response to the committee’s requests and will continue to do so moving forward.”

This isn’t the first time Republicans have tried to prove that the bias is real, but investigations into the matter have so far proved that it doesn’t exist. The Twitter Files do indeed seem to show government overreach at times, but the committee will be hard-pressed to prove that the other companies are engaged in censorship at the behest of government agencies. Still, nonpartisan investigations in the past have shown some concerning activity in this regard.

The companies have until March 23 to provide documents to the committee.

Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr