Remember when so many argued that media giants like Google were censoring voices online – only to be told they were imagining it. Well, in a dramatic reversal, Google has publicly acknowledged that Joe Biden’s administration pressured it to remove content from YouTube, even when that content did not violate the company’s policies. The tech giant is now offering an olive branch, of sorts, saying it will reinstate content creators whose accounts were banned for speech related to COVID-19 and the 2020 election. What’s behind this sudden admission?
On Sept. 23, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, submitted a letter from its lawyers to the House Judiciary Committee in which it admitted, “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.” Furthermore, “It is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden administration, attempts to dictate how the company moderates content,” Alphabet’s lawyers wrote.
That same year, Google was accused of demonetizing The Federalist, a conservative media outlet, as well as ZeroHedge.
Content bans affected prominent users, too. In 2022, Dan Bongino was banned from YouTube for two videos he posted that questioned the effectiveness of wearing face masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) was suspended in August 2021 after he was in a video about two peer-reviewed studies that said cloth masks didn’t prevent the spread of viruses. And in June 2023, YouTube took down a video by podcast host Jordan Peterson, who was interviewing Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a presidential candidate at the time. YouTube said it was removed “for violating YouTube’s general vaccine misinformation policy, which prohibits content that alleges that vaccines cause chronic side effects, outside of rare side effects that are recognized by health authorities,” as reported by The Washington Times.
Now, Google is informing people they can reopen their accounts if they were shut down for publishing content that scrutinized the 2020 election and COVID-19 protocols. But that’s not good enough for some. “Google owes us all damages for what their censorship cost us,” Federalist CEO and co-founder Sean Davis said. “A quick ‘we’re sorry’ now that they’re in trouble isn’t going to cut it. Their censorship cost us millions.”
Mike Benz, in a 2022 article for the Foundation for Freedom Online, wrote about the ties between Google and the government. He summarized the article:
“The US government asked Google to run recruitment ads for the role of ‘Infodemic Manager Unicorns,’ whose job was to censor the ‘pandemic of misinformation’ on the Internet.
“‘Unicorns’ would use artificial intelligence software to scan social media for speech patterns expressing dissent with government COVID policies and mandates.
“CDC directly asked Google to manually alter its search engines so that CDC pages would ‘come up higher in [search] results.’”
Google likely came clean because of political pressure, legal risk, business deals with the government, money lost when creators were demonetized, and the need to repair its image. Let’s look a little deeper into these.
Political Pressure From Congress
When members of Congress hold hearings, send letters, or threaten to use subpoenas, it creates unwanted high-profile attention. If Google offers solutions, it can help calm lawmakers, reduce the heat from oversight, and avoid more aggressive investigations or sanctions.
Legal and Regulatory Risk
Google faces lawsuits and regulatory probes on many fronts. Public concessions and corrective action can soften legal arguments against the company and show judges and regulators that Google is responsive, perhaps blunting calls for harsher penalties.
Big Government AI and Cloud Contracts
Government agencies buy hefty cloud and AI contracts that bring in a lot of money. If Google avoids public fights with officials, it’s less likely that those officials will block or delay future deals.
The GSA signed a OneGov deal with Google to offer Gemini — Google’s AI tools — to federal agencies at a steep discount. That means Google’s AI is being rolled straight into government work. Big, high-profile deals encourage Google to stay on good terms with officials who purchase those services.
Google Public Sector also announced a contract worth up to $200 million to help the Department of Defense’s Chief Digital and AI Office build out AI and cloud tools. Defense work brings large sums of money and plenty of scrutiny. If Google gets into public fights with officials, it could make delivering this work more difficult or put future contracts at risk.
Advertiser and Creator Money (demonetization hurts)
Banning big creators cuts YouTube’s views and advertising income. Reinstating them brings back the audience and advertisement dollars, keeping advertisers happy.
Reputation and the PR Playbook
A public apology or small policy change is a quick way to change the story. It suggests the company is taking responsibility – without admitting its whole operation was broken.
For example, Mark Zuckerberg said, “It was my mistake, and I’m sorry,” after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. That apology and the promise to fix things became a model for other tech bosses to follow when they face political heat.
Now, Google is doing something similar. It called government pressure “unacceptable and wrong” and rolled out a policy tweak to give certain banned creators a path to restore their accounts. Business Insider even called this a familiar PR move by Big Tech to calm lawmakers without offering a detailed admission of fault.
Google has moved beyond being just a consumer-facing site – it’s a major vendor of cloud and AI tools to federal agencies and the defense sector. Those contracts are large and watched closely by lawmakers and regulators. Because of that, Google has a strong reason to avoid controversies that could endanger contracts or lead to tougher oversight. That helps explain why Google might back away from past moderation moves and invite some banned creators back.