Google has said it will allow YouTube accounts that were banned for spreading Covid and election misinformation in 2020 to apply for reinstatement.
In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Alphabet’s (the parent company of Google, which owns YouTube) lawyers claimed that “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”.
Further, the company said that though it continued to “develop and enforce its policies independently, Biden administration officials continued to press the company to remove non-violative user-generated content”.
In 2020, when the pandemic had forced most people to their homes and the first Donald Trump administration was in place, YouTube implemented a “medical misinformation policy” that allowed blocking of content promoting Covid conspiracy theories. Then came the January 6, 2021, riots in the US Capitol. YouTube temporarily suspended some channels, including Trump’s (it was reinstated in 2023), which claimed that the election was “stolen” from Trump.
“Today, YouTube’s Community Guidelines allow for a wider range of content regarding Covid and election integrity,” Alphabet lawyer Daniel F. Donovan wrote to House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan.
YouTube wrote on X that it will be a “limited” project open to “a subset of creators” as well as channels that were terminated under policies the company has since
“deprecated”.
Among channels previously deplatformed were those associated with FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, White House counterterrorism chief Sebastian Gorka, and War Room podcast host Steve Bannon.
There has been increasing Republican pressure on tech companies to reverse Joe Biden-era speech policies on vaccines and misinformation. In March, Jordan sent a subpoena to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, alleging YouTube was a “direct participant in the federal government’s censorship regime”.
On Tuesday, Jordan posted on X: “Due to our oversight efforts, Google commits to offer all creators previously kicked off YouTube due to political speech violations to return to the platform”.
YouTube, which has over two billion users worldwide, said the company “values conservative voices on its platform and recognises that these creators have
extensive reach and play an important role in civic discourse”.
The Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr last week threatened ABC because of remarks the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel made about Right-wing activist, the late Charlie Kirk. Within hours, ABC suspended Kimmel’s show, but on Tuesday, the network announced that Jimmy Kimmel Live! will return to its airwaves.