YouTube complied with U.S. censors during COVID, Google says

Google on Tuesday afternoon detailed how the Biden administration pressured it to moderate content during the COVID-19 pandemic. The company was asked to remove content and ban accounts that didn’t directly contradict YouTube’s policies, according to a letter to the House Judiciary Committee from Daniel Donovan, an attorney for Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

Donovan wrote:

“Senior Biden administration officials conducted repeated and sustained outreach to Alphabet and pressed the company regarding certain user-generated content related to COVID-19. As online platforms grappled with these decisions, the administration’s officials, including President Biden, created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms based on their concerns regarding misinformation.”

YouTube will allow creators to rejoin the platform if their accounts were removed during the pandemic, according to the letter.

Alphabet’s lawyer wrote in response to congressional subpoenas issued earlier this year that, among other things, asked the company to detail how it had interacted with the Biden administration. The company said it believed such pressure was unacceptable and wrong. Donovan said that Google will continue to push back on similar policies on First Amendment grounds.

Why is the letter important? Republicans have warned for years that government pressure on public companies has disenfranchised conservative thought leaders. The letter from Google appears to reaffirm concerns that the Biden administration unfairly sought to limit speech through private-sector platforms like YouTube.

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives continues to investigate how much executive authority President Biden delegated to his aides—and whether those aides should be held responsible for some of the decisions made during Biden’s tenure.

Dig deeper: This isn’t the first time political forces have tried to go through social media platforms to reach a desired end. Back in 2023, Ukraine and the FBI worked with social media companies to try to shape their content.