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This is Fresh Air.

I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross, who's off this week.

Metta, the owners of Facebook and Instagram, announced Wednesday that both platforms will

restore the accounts of former President Donald Trump, ending a two year suspension that

began after the assault on the US Capitol in 2021.

The Congressional Committee that investigated the January 6th riot spent considerable effort

looking into the role of social media in assembling the mob and fueling the violence, but

very little of their evidence and findings made it into the Committee's 800 page final

report. Our guest today, Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell, is part of a team of

reporters who brought those findings into the public sphere.

They wrote an article about a 122 page memo investigator circulated among the committee,

based on their interviews with employees of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other tech

platforms, as well as other research.

They found that tech companies failed to act on their own employees warnings about violent,

rhetoric growing on their platforms, in part out of reluctance to penalize conservatives,

particularly then President Trump.

Drew Harwell is a technology reporter for the Post. He was part of an international reporting

team that won a George Polk Award in 2021. Before he joined the Post in 2014, he worked

for the Tampa Bay Times.

Drew Harwell, welcome back to Fresh Air.

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