Google announced that it will offer YouTube accounts to creators who were previously removed for their views on COVID-19.
“The Company terminated channels for repeatedly violating its Community Guidelines on elections integrity content through 2023 and COVID-19 content through 2024,” the company wrote in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH). “Today, YouTube’s Community Guidelines allow for a wider range of content regarding COVID-19 and elections integrity. Reflecting the Company’s commitment to free expression, YouTube will provide an opportunity for all creators to rejoin the platform if the Company terminated their channels for repeated violations of COVID-19 and elections integrity policies that are no longer in effect.”
“Reflecting the Company’s commitment to free expression, YouTube will provide an opportunity for all creators to rejoin the platform if the Company terminated their channels for repeated violations of COVID-19 and elections integrity policies that are no longer in effect,” a lawyer for Google’s parent company, Alphabet, explained.
The letter admitted that the Biden administration pushed the company to remove and censor certain accounts. “Senior Biden Administration officials, including White House officials, conducted repeated and sustained outreach to Alphabet and pressed the Company regarding certain user-generated content related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate its policies,” the lawyer wrote.
“While the Company continued to develop and enforce its policies independently, Biden Administration officials continued to press the Company to remove non-violative user-generated content,” the letter read, calling the previous administration’s actions “unacceptable and wrong.”
The lawyer went on to note that Youtube “values conservative voices on its platform and recognizes that these creators have extensive reach and play an important role in civic discourse.”
Jordan celebrated Google’s decisions as “MASSIVE wins for the American people, the First Amendment, and freedom.”
In 2024, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted the Biden administration pressured the social media platform to censor Americans.
Zuckerberg wrote to Jordan that in 2021, “senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.”
