Republicans in Congress have introduced the first of what will likely be many bills aimed at curbing the power of Big Tech censorship, by attempting to cut off financial cooperation between social media companies and the federal government.
As reported by Just The News, the Exposing Lewd Outlays for Social Networking Companies Act, or “ELON Act,” was introduced by Congresswoman Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), with none other cosponsors. The bill would order a one-year halt on taxpayer-funded payments to social media companies by the Department of Justice (DOJ), and would also call for a massive audit of all such payments by the DOJ since 2015.
The bill was introduced in response to one of the latest revelations of government corruption in Deep State bureaucracies, where it was revealed that the FBI had paid Twitter over $3 million to censor various tweets and accounts, going as far back as the 2020 presidential election.
In the story first broken by journalist Michael Shellenberger, an internal email was sent to Twitter’s then-Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker, informing him that the FBI had paid $3.42 million to the company between October of 2019 and February of 2021. The email’s subject line read “Run the business – we made money!”
Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk confirmed the story, tweeting that the “government paid Twitter millions of dollars to censor info from the public.” The FBI also confirmed the story’s authenticity, but defended the payments as simply “reimbursement” for “reasonable costs and expenses associated with their response to a legal process,” as well as “for complying with legal requests, and a standard procedure.”
“Big Tech is in bed with the FBI and other agencies to the point where Congress can’t tell where one ends and the other begins,” said Congresswoman Boebert in a statement. “The millions of dollars sent to Twitter that we know of during an election cycle, when they were at the same time censoring the Hunter Biden laptop from hell, is incredibly concerning. We must expose the incestuous relationship between Big Tech and the federal government. My bill does exactly that.”