House Judiciary Committee Republicans claim Facebook hid still-visible student loans post

Committee’s GOP members are notorious for using social media feeds to rant about Democrats and denigrate 6 January hearings

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee have claimed that Facebook censored one of their posts about Joe Biden’s student debt relief announcement, pointing to it as another example of “big tech” censorship.

However, the post remains visible on the GOP members’ Facebook feed – underneath another describing the alleged action as “unbelievable”.

The GOP Judiciary Committee’s posts on Facebook and Twitter generally strike a caustic and oppositional tone when it comes to events in Congress, the Biden administration and the Democratic agenda in general, often commenting on matters well beyond the committee’s purview.

True to form, the feed’s reaction to the president’s new student loan policy – which offers up to $10,000 in debt relief for graduates making less than $125,000 a year – was a welter of belligerent critical posts.

“Joe Biden’s student loan “forgiveness” plan is a total disaster for Real America”, read one, linking to a post by the committee’s top Republican, Jim Jordan. Another took the form of a callout, asking followers to “SHARE if you think forgiving student loans for a wealthy “gender studies” major with no job is a dumb idea.”

The “offending” post, meanwhile, reads: “If you take out a loan, you pay it back. Period.” Some seven hours later, the page shared a screenshot of the message alongside an image of a notification from Facebook saying “your post goes against our Community Standards so only you can see it”.

“WOW”, the post read: “Facebook says our post about paying back loans violates their “community standards. Big Tech’s at it again.”

However, several hours later, the post was visible again, including to users who do not follow the page. Democratic Judiciary Committee member responded to his colleagues’ claim critically: “Facebook should leave it up,” he tweeted. “But it does violate the truth. Morons.”

In fact, a Facebook spokesperson commented under the outraged tweet with the following: “There is nothing about the content of this post that violates our policies, people should not have been prevented from sharing it and we're working to fix it now.”

Among its recent Facebook posts and tweets in the last 24 hours, the page has shared a welter of caustic opinions about the loan policy from GOP members of Congress. It also ranted that “Joe Biden’s student loan ‘forgiveness’ plan is a total disaster for Real America” – not elaborating on why college graduates – a category of American that includes every single Republican Judiciary Committee member – are “unreal”.

It also shared a mocking GIF in response to Joe Biden’s insistence that he had no foreknowledge of the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, as well as Mr Jordan’s own claim that “They’ve been out to get President Trump because he’s a threat to the clique, to the swamp, to the bureaucracy, and to the deep state. They won’t stop.”

Among the most infamous of the feeds’ past behaviour was its counterprogramming during the January 6 select committee’s hearings in the summer, which dismissed the televised sessions as boring and inconsequential – this as numerous witnesses talked about the abuse and threats of violence they had experienced as a result of conspiracy theories spread by Donald Trump and Republican members of Congress.