Robert F Kennedy Jr. defended himself on Thursday against allegations that he deals in racist and hateful online conspiracy theories, and tested at a House hearing on government censorship despite calls from outside groups to fire the Democratic presidential candidate over his recent anti-Semitic remarks.

The federal government’s Republican-led Select Subcommittee on Armaments reinforces GOP claims that conservatives and others are being unfairly targeted by tech companies that routinely work with the government to curb the spread of disinformation online.

In his opening remarks, Kennedy invoked his famous family’s legacy by dismissing the charges of racism and anti-Semitism against him.

This is an attempt to censor a censorship hearing, Robert’s son Kennedy said

S

F. Kennedy and the cousin of President John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy defended his social media posts, which delved into race, vaccine safety and other issues, such as

also not

Racist or anti-Semitic. He said his family has long believed in the First Amendment right to free speech.

The First Amendment was not written for easy talk, Kennedy said. It was a speech no one likes you about.

Republicans are eager to elevate Kennedy after he announced in April that he was running a long-running Democratic primary challenge for President Biden. Kennedy’s presidential campaign chairman Dennis Kucinich, the former congressman and former presidential candidate, sat in the front row behind him.

The Big Tech companies have flatly denied the GOP’s claims, saying they enforce their rules impartially to everyone, regardless of ideology or political affiliation. And researchers have found no widespread evidence that social media companies are biased against conservative news, messages or materials.

The top Democrat on the House panel, Del. Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands said the Republican majority provided a platform for Kennedy and others to promote conspiracy theories and a rallying cry for bigotry and hatred.

This isn’t the kind of free speech I’m familiar with, Plaskett said.

The hearing comes after a federal judge recently tried to prevent the Biden administration from collaborating with the social media companies to monitor misinformation and other online postings. An appeals court temporarily suspended the order.

The panel chair, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), was behind the decision to allow Kennedy to testify. In his own opening remarks, Jordan portrayed what he believed were examples of censorship, including a White House request for Twitter to remove a race-based post by Kennedy about COVID-19 vaccines.

That’s why Mr. Kennedy wants to run for president to help us expose and stop what’s going on, Jordan said.

A watchdog group asked Jordan to drop the invitation to Kennedy after he suggested that COVID-19 could have been ethnically targeted to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.

In those filmed comments first published by the New York Post, Kennedy said there is an argument that COVID-19 is ethnically targeted and that it disproportionately attacks certain races.

After the video was made public, Kennedy posted on Twitter that his words were twisted and denied ever suggesting that COVID-19 was deliberately designed to spare Jewish people. He called for the article in Posts to be withdrawn.

But Kennedy has a history of comparing vaccines widely believed to have saved millions of lives to the genocide of the Holocaust during Nazi Germany, comments for which he has sometimes apologized.

An organization founded by Kennedy, Children’s Health Defense, currently has a lawsuit against a number of news organizations, including the Associated Press, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking action to identify misinformation, including about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines.

Jordan said that while he disagreed with Kennedy’s comments, he had no intention of dropping him from the panel.

House

Speaker Kevin McCarthy

(R-Bakersfield)

took a similar stance, saying he did not want to censor Kennedy.

Before the hearing, Democratic Representative Gerry Connolly of Virginia said Kennedy held despicable beliefs. By promoting Mr. Kennedy, Republicans are deliberately providing a platform to amplify hate speech, he said.

The panel wants to investigate how the federal government is working with technology companies to flag posts that contain false information or outright lies. Hanging over the debate is part of the federal communications law, section 230, which protects tech companies like Twitter and Facebook from liability for what is said on their platforms.

Legislators on the panel were

Are

also hear testimonials

journalist

Emma Joe Morris

van, journalist at

Breitbart News, which has reported extensively on Biden’s son, Hunter Biden; and D. John Sauer, a former Missouri attorney general who is now a special assistant attorney general in the Louisiana Department of Justice involved in the lawsuit against the Biden administration.

Morris tweeted part of her opening remarks describing an elaborate censorship conspiracy “that she claimed wanted to stop her coverage of Hunter Biden.

Another witness, Maya Wiley, the president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, digressed from her prepared remarks to implore lawmakers to consider the importance of having platforms for Americans to share opinions, but also the importance of them being based on fact, not fiction.

The US is hesitant to regulate the social media giants, even as outside groups warn of the rise of hate speech and misinformation that could be erosive to civil society.

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