Sep. 15—Sen. Josh Hawley is looking for legal action against social media companies after a whistleblower said close to 4,000 employees at Twitter have access to user data.

"I would like to see Twitter and these other social media companies actually protect the rights of their users, quit censoring people, quit doxxing them, quit kicking them off the platforms one day when they don't mouth the liberal party line," Hawley said.

Hawley said the whistleblower Peter "Mudge" Zatko testified that engineers have the ability to tweet on users' behalf.

"It's a Dumpster fire, but it's a Dumpster fire in a way that really threatens the safety and the free speech of Americans," Hawley said.

Hawley said he wants social media companies to be able to be sued, something he said is not happening currently.

"The American people ought to be able to go sue Twitter and sue Facebook and sue Google if they are discriminated against. They ought to be able to sue them if their information gets doxxed by a Twitter engineer for example," Hawley said.

Tracking in other ways

Hawley sent a letter Tuesday to CEOs of Visa, MasterCard and American Express calling on them to reverse their decisions to separately categorize gun purchases from other retail transactions.

Hawley said this sets a dangerous precedent for tracking gun owners.

"They've caved to anti-Second Amendment lobby groups that have for years been trying to get these credit card companies and the banks to track gun purchases. It's a step towards tracking firearm owners, and I'm totally opposed to it," Hawley said. "They've never, ever individually tracked gun purchases because they don't need to, it doesn't serve any purpose other than a political purpose."

Clayton Anderson can be reached at clayton.anderson@newspressnow.com. Follow him on twitter: @NPNowAnderson.