Google and its parent company Alphabet Inc. finally put in writing what many have suspected for years: Senior Biden-era officials “conducted repeated and sustained outreach” to the company and pressed YouTube to remove COVID-related videos that did not violate YouTube’s policies.

In a Sep. 23 letter to House Judiciary chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Alphabet’s counsel called such government attempts to dictate moderation “unacceptable and wrong” and said YouTube will create a pathway for creators banned under now-retired COVID-19 and 2020/2024 election policies to return.  Google’s mea culpa followed a March 6, 2025 subpoena issued by Jordan.

The House Judiciary Committee summarized the admission, underscoring five key points from Google:

1. Biden officials pressured the company to censor Americans and take down lawful content.
2. Google considers that pressure “unacceptable and wrong.”
3. Public debate should not hinge on deferring to “authorities.”
4. The company will not empower third-party fact-checkers to label or remove content.
5. European speech rules, including the Digital Services Act, risk forcing removal of lawful American speech.

In unusually plain language for outside counsel, Alphabet told Congress that during COVID-19, “White House officials” sought removal of non-violative videos and that the broader political atmosphere — “including President Biden” — sought to influence platform decisions.  Alphabet says it “consistently fought against those efforts on First Amendment grounds.”

Google excused its behavior, arguing that the “COVID-19 pandemic was an unprecedented time in which online platforms had to reach decisions about how best to balance freedom of expression with responsibility, including responsibility with respect to the moderation of user-generated content that could result in real-world harm.”  But this reads as a convenient, too-little, too-late defense.  Google knew what it was doing and chose policies that harmed lawful speech anyway.  Even Alphabet’s lawyers now concede that “it is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden Administration, attempts to dictate how the company moderates content” — a striking admission, given that the COVID- and election-related speech at issue was plainly protected by the First Amendment.

To illustrate just how materially damaging the removals were, Richard Baris speaks not only to his own experience, but also many others’ all too common experiences with Google.  Baris (People’s Pundit) is a well respected data analyst and commentator whose polling outfit, Big Data Poll, has accurately predicted several presidential elections, including 2024.

During his appearance on the Sep. 24, 2025 QuiteFrankly podcast, Baris describes the excruciating consequences of being suppressed and then banned by Google’s YouTube.  Like so many others, he was repeatedly struck, demonetized, and throttled by Google, actions that translated to significant lost income, lost audience, and throttled fact-based reporting.

Baris said the strikes and demonetization were ironically triggered by concrete pieces of journalism and data analysis.  In one instance, he said he aired and analyzed remarks from the U.K. health minister — summarizing that masking children “didn’t prevent” transmission and could harm cognitive and social development.  He said the video was struck for “medical misinformation.”  YouTube, he said, repeatedly threatened channel closure when he and his team presented longitudinal findings and compared them with published studies.  Baris believes that much of it was political, and he is not wrong.  It is not at all different from what was revealed by Mike Benz or what was uncovered in the Twitter Files.

So we weren’t allowed to talk about scientific consensus, Frank. We were not allowed to ask questions or challenge or offer up new information about something. That should have been one of the biggest scientific debates of our time. And what pisses me off about Jim Jordan is that he had to make it political.

Baris was permanently demonetized in April 2020 (restored only in April 2025), precisely when election coverage and public health policy debates drove viewership and when ad revenue would have been highest.  He also shared that he was targeted well before 2020, when he was removed from Google News before the 2016 election, following his election forecasts that outperformed mainstream models.  He also shared that he built a WordPress Google News plugin in 2015.  It helped small outlets comply with indexing rules — making his later delisting even more punitive to traffic.  Baris explained:

I was one of the first sites to get structured metadata in the header of our website for what was called claim reviews, which we now know to be fact checks. My sin was that I was more accurate than Nate Silver and Larry Sabato. Trump won the election and we were removed from Google without any warning.

Notably, Baris also spoke to his experiences in greater detail during his own Inside the Numbers podcast on Sep. 24, 2025.

Baris is understandably cynical about Google’s admission, saying that not only is Google late to the game, but the admission effectively does nothing to restore what he lost:

It got to the point with us where, first, we would get the strikes and we would say, wow, we just can’t even roll on YouTube until this strike falls off. And we were doing that. The strike would fall off, and we’d get another one and they would just ban us from being able to stream for two weeks.

And then we were demonetized. You know, we didn’t have the ability to do that. So ... now they’re coming out with the fact that we didn’t violate the terms of service. So, going forward, what does that even mean?

I think we all have to just assume the worst, which is — notice they didn’t even respond to the February 2023 congressional subpoena. They only responded when they got hit with another subpoena. It’s in Jim Jordan’s own press release. Why? What were they doing? They were waiting to see if Trump lost the election.

For Baris, the issue is not just free expression, but accountability.

I want my money. Tim Pool should get his money. Steven Crowder should get his money. There’s a lot of money we were denied because of this. The only way to stop it from happening again is to hit them in their pocket so they never think of doing it again.

The deeper question remains: If Big Tech and government can collude to silence dissent in the middle of a national crisis, or a presidential election, what prevents them from doing it again?  Baris warns,

A Democrat gets in office, and they’ll go right back to it. The next COVID, they’ll go right back to it. Unless they pay a huge price for it, nothing will change.

Ironically, Baris’s warning proved prophetic.  Within hours of YouTube restoring the channels of Alex Jones and Nick Fuentes, the platform took them down again, calling the move a “pilot program.”

YouTube stated the following on Sep. 25:

We’ve seen some previously terminated creators try to start new channels.  To clarify, our pilot program on terminations is not yet open.  It’s still against our Community Guidelines for previously terminated users to use, possess or create other channels and we’ll terminate new channels from previously terminated users in accordance with these guidelines.  We’ll have more to share on the limited pilot program soon.

Image via Pxhere.