Congressman Jim Jordan on Tuesday celebrated Google’s decision to reinstate YouTube creators censored under President Joe Biden, calling the decision “a win for free expression.”
The Ohio Republican told The Daily Wire that Google and YouTube parent company Alphabet admitted in a Tuesday letter that the company and its subsidiaries bowed to pressure from the Biden administration to censor conservative creators speaking out about election integrity and COVID-19.
“They had kicked some people off the YouTube platform altogether — you, your channel, you’re gone. They’ve agreed to reinstate those individuals, which I think is good. They’ve said they will not use the fact-checkers, like other platforms have done — which was a big problem because fact-checkers are typically really biased against conservatives. I thought it was, again, a win for the First Amendment, a win for free expression.”
Alphabet on Tuesday pledged its “commitment to free expression,” and said it “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if the company terminated their channels for repeated violations of COVID-19 and elections integrity policies that are no longer in effect.”
Creators banned under this regime include Dan Bongino and Sebastian Gorka, both of whom now serve in the Trump administration.
Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, recalled just how extreme the Biden administration’s censorship efforts were.
“Never forget the Biden administration established the disinformation governance board,” Jordan said on Wednesday’s edition of Morning Wire. “I mean, the most Orwellian-sounding thing you could think of — as if a bunch of bureaucrats can tell you what you can say, what you can read, what you can tweet, what you can post! That was frightening stuff.”
Fortunately, Jordan notes, “we had an election last November and, thank goodness, things changed.”
Still, Jordan isn’t ready to give up the fight, warning that the United States could soon fall victim to European speech restrictions — something congressional Republicans are fighting to stop.
European speech laws are creating complications for the American social platforms, Jordan said. In particular, the European Union’s Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act could force restrictive European speech codes on Americans.
Jordan takes that risk seriously.
Earlier this month, British authorities arrested Irish comedian Graham Linehan upon his landing at London’s Heathrow Airport after a flight from the United States. At issue were a series of X posts he wrote in April, which included jokes about transgender-identifying people.
“If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls,” one of Linehan’s posts in question read.
Americans are generally not in danger of arrest in the United States for mocking leftist ideologies, such as transgenderism. But they are still under threat of suppression and retaliation from companies like YouTube or other influential entities, Jordan says.
“I think it’s just a matter of time before that happens to an American,” the lawmaker told The Daily Wire. “We’re particularly concerned about that relative to YouTube.”