Former senior staff at Twitter will testify on Wednesday before the House oversight committee about the social media platform’s handling of reporting on Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden.

The hearing has set the stage for the agenda of a newly Republican-controlled House, underscoring its intention to home in on longstanding and unsubstantiated allegations that big tech has an anti-conservative bias.

The recently departed Twitter employees set to testify include Vijaya Gadde, the social network’s former chief legal officer, former deputy general counsel James Baker and former head of safety and integrity Yoel Roth.

The hearing will center on a question that has long dogged Republicans – why Twitter decided to temporarily restrict the sharing of a story about Hunter Biden in the New York Post, released in October 2020. The Post said it had received a copy of a laptop hard drive from Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, that Hunter Biden had dropped off 18 months earlier at a Delaware computer repair shop and never retrieved. Twitter initially blocked people from sharing links to the article for several days, citing concerns over misinformation and spreading a report based on potentially hacked materials.

“Americans deserve answers about this attack on the first amendment and why big tech and the Swamp colluded to censor this information about the Biden family selling access for profit,” said the Republican committee chairman James Comer. “Accountability is coming.”

At the time, the article was greeted with skepticism due to questions about the laptop’s origins, including Giuliani’s involvement. Twitter initially said the article had been blocked in keeping with its “hacked materials” policy, which restricted the sharing of unlawfully accessed materials. While it explicitly allowed “reporting on a hack, or sharing press coverage of hacking”, it blocked stories that included “personal and private information – like email addresses and phone numbers”. The platform amended these rules following the Biden controversy.

Months later, Twitter’s then CEO, Jack Dorsey, called the company’s communications around the Post article “not great”. He added that blocking the article’s URL with “zero context” around why it was blocked was “unacceptable”.

Elon Musk, who purchased the company last year, has since shared a series of internal records showing how the company initially blocked the story from being shared, citing pressure from the Biden administration, among other factors.

Republican theories that Democrats are colluding with big tech to suppress conservative speech have become a hot button issue in Washington, with Congress members using various tech hearings to grill executives. But experts say claims of anti-conservative bias have been disproven by independent researchers.

“What we’ve seen time and again is that companies are deplatforming people who are spreading racism and conspiracy theories in violation of the company’s rule,” said Jessica J González, co-chief executive officer of the civil rights group Free Press.

“The fact that those people are disproportionately Republicans has nothing to do with it,” she added. “This is about right or wrong, not left or right.”

Musk’s decision to release information about the laptop story comes after he allowed the return of high-profile figures banned for spreading misinformation and engaging in hate speech, including the former president. The executive has shared and engaged with conspiracy theories on his personal account.

The White House has sought to discredit the Republican investigation into Hunter Biden, calling them “divorced-from-reality political stunts”. Nonetheless, Republicans now hold subpoena power in the House, giving them the authority to compel testimony and conduct an aggressive investigation.

Online advocacy groups and big tech watchdogs have said the focus on alleged anti-conservative bias from social media firms has served as a distraction from legitimate concerns, delaying the chance for useful legislation to address issues like misinformation, antitrust concerns and online hate speech.

“The fact that this is the very first tech hearing of this Congress says something,” González said. “There are real problems facing people across the political spectrum because of big tech, and lack of regulation. But instead we are getting a big waste of time, and a political stunt. The focus of Congress ought to be serving the people who elected them to office.”

The Associated Press contributed to this article