Google has announced it will reverse a major content moderation decision: YouTube will offer channels that were banned for spreading covid and election misinformation in 2020 a pathway back onto the platform.
In a letter sent to the House Judiciary Committee, Alphabet’s lawyers claimed that the Biden administration had previously “pressed the Company” to remove user-generated Covid-19 content that had not violated Alphabet’s policies, and that the “political atmosphere” had forced their hand. “It is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden Administration, attempts to dictate how the Company moderates content,” they wrote.
Back in 2020, during the height of the pandemic and during the first Trump administration, YouTube implemented a “medical misinformation policy” that blocked content promoting covid conspiracy theories and eventually banned them outright. After the January 6th riots in the U.S. Capitol, YouTube temporarily suspended channels, including Donald Trump’s own YouTube channel, that claimed that the election was “stolen” from Trump. They continued to crack down on high-profile MAGA influencers for violating those policies, such as demonetizing and removing videos from Steven Crowder’s channel in 2021.
Stating that YouTube’s Community Guidelines around election integrity and covid-19 content had evolved significantly since 2020, Alphabet said that, in order to reflect their “commitment to free expression,” they would offer an opportunity for creators to return to YouTube if the rules they’d broken back then “are no longer in effect.” YouTube will also stop using third-party fact checkers, which the GOP and the MAGA influencer world previously argued undermined conservative content that spread misinformation.
“YouTube values conservative voices on its platform and recognizes that these creators have extensive reach and play an important role in civic discourse,” Alphabet continued.
YouTube also posted a separate statement on X clarifying the nature of the program, calling it a “limited pilot project that will be available to a subset of creators in addition to those channels terminated for policies that have been deprecated.”
House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) has subpoenaed Google and Alphabet several times over the years, most recently to ask whether the Biden administration had pushed them in any way to suppress “free speech”. On Tuesday, he celebrated Alphabet’s policy change in a thread on X, stating that YouTube was making “amends” to the American people by giving deplatformed content creators such as Dan Bongino, now the deputy director of the FBI, a way back on. “This is another victory in the fight against censorship,” he wrote, and laid out Google’s other political concessions, such as joining the American right-wing in opposition to European content moderation laws, which they claim censor American free speech.
Alphabet is also currently dealing with antitrust lawsuits from the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, which have not let up under the Trump administration. Itrecently got a slight reprieve in its search results trial, when a federal judge ruled that Google is allowed to keep Chrome despite holding an illegal monopoly on search engines. In another case, after being found guilty of holding an illegal monopoly in digital advertising, Google is now arguing in federal court that its lucrative ad tech business should not be broken up.