PHOENIX – A Scottsdale lawmaker has been selected to lead a panel designed, at least in part, to investigate the activities of Katie Hobbs before she was governor.

House Speaker Ben Toma, R-Peoria, created the special panel, and named Rep. Alexander Kolodin, R-Scottsdale, to chair it.

The three-member panel is charged with examining "government censorship and conduct of state executive officials.''

The announcement came recently and less than 24 hours after a new report on the internet that Hobbs used her position as secretary of state in 2020 to get X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, to take down new responses critical of her 2017 post comparing supporters of Donald Trump to Nazis.

Toma said: “We had been planning this stuff for months.”

Kolodin told Capitol Media Services the special panel is about more than Hobbs' activities.

"There has never been a really comprehensive legislative investigation into the way we are protecting or failing to protect the First Amendment in this new age of machine learning and neural networks and algorithms that decide what people are served online,'' he said.

"It's something that we want to make sure that we have the information that we need to craft intelligent legislation that aims to protect the First Amendment rights of Arizonans in the digital age.''

The committee is charged only with investigating the activities of those in the executive branch.

"I don't think there's ever been any reports that the legislature has been trying to decide or curate or censor online speech,'' Kolodin said, offering to add that to the panel's task if someone presents such information.

But he is questioning Hobbs' claim that she had a right to file a complaint with Twitter, now known as X, about the 2020 postings.

"There comes a point where it crosses the line into state action,'' Kolodin said. "And part of what this committee is going to investigate is where is that point.''

Still, Kolodin said, he does not think it's proper for statewide officials, using their official accounts and their taxpayer-funded staff, to make such requests.

"That, to me, crosses the line from, 'I'm a person who is aggrieved personally' to now 'I'm asking you to do this on behalf of the state' which, of course, always carries with it, implied carrots and sticks,'' he said.

"Elected officials, especially statewide officials, very powerful people,'' Kolodin said. "They can make life nice or not so nice for big corporations.''

Elected officials, he said, understand when they run for office that "people would say mean things,'' and they can't use the power of government to shut that down.