Report: Biden 'pressured Google to suppress Covid content'
Google has committed to reinstating YouTubers who had their accounts banned over medical and political content after Joe Biden 's administration pressured the company to censor dissidents. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, published a letter sent to him from the company's attorneys on Tuesday. Within the five-page 'statement of facts' sent to the panel are claims that the former president and his administration applied 'unacceptable and wrong' pressure on YouTube to silence creators with whom the Democrats disagreed.
Included in some of those impacted are Trump's former advisor Steve Bannon , Trump's Deputy Assistant to the president Sebastian Gorka and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino. Bongino was banned from YouTube in 2022 for questioning the effectiveness of masks in preventing COVID-19, an infraction the company labeled as misinformation at the time.
The sprawling letter notes how senior Biden administration officials conducted 'repeated and sustained outreach' to coerce Alphabet - Google and YouTube's parent company - to censor and remove content related to COVID-19 . Alphabet was repeatedly pestered by unnamed senior Biden administration officials to remove content that the federal officials deemed inappropriate, despite it not violating the company's policies. The letter mentions how 'the Administration's officials, including President Biden, created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms.'
'It is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden Administration, attempts to dictate how the company moderates content,' it continues. Jordan, who has been investigating how tech companies worked with the Democrats to suppress free speech since 2023, lauded Alphabet's admission. 'This is another victory in the fight against censorship,' he wrote on X.
'But that's not all. YouTube is making changes to its platform to prevent future censorship. YouTube is committing to the American people that it will never use outside so-called 'fact-checkers' to censor speech,' Jordan continued. Last year, Meta similarly admitted that the Biden administration ' pressured' Facebook to censor Americans' posts . It also admitted to throttling the now-infamous Hunter Biden laptop story on the eve of the 2020 election on the advice of 'fact-checkers.'
The company then implemented changes to prevent similar instances in the future, and no longer employs fact-checkers YouTube is now doing the same, the attorneys wrote on Tuesday. 'In contrast to other large platforms, YouTube has not operated a fact-checking program that identifies and compensates fact-checking partners to produce content to support moderation. YouTube has not and will not empower fact-checkers to take action on or label content across the Company's services.'
The company will also begin to use community notes, a crowdsourced information service on X that enables users to flag misleading or inaccurate posts. In addition, Alphabet disclosed that European laws regarding free speech have been putting a burden on American tech firms.
The letter specifically states that the European Union's Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act place a 'disproportionate regulatory burden on American companies.' The controversial laws, which regulate disinformation and major tech firms like Alphabet, Meta and TikTok, could impact freedom of speech in the U.S., Alphabet claimed.