OAN Staff Blake Wolf
9:34 AM – Tuesday, September 24, 2025
In a document given to the House Judiciary Committee, tech giant Google admitted that it previously banned accounts that questioned official narratives during the COVID-19 pandemic at the behest of the Biden administration.
The document, which was sent on Tuesday by Alphabet chief counsel Daniel Donovan, detailed Google’s plans to reinstate accounts that were banned for “repeated violations of COVID-19 and election integrity policies,” which includes a wide range of figures, such as FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, White House counterterrorism chief Sebastian Gorka, and “War Room” podcast host Steve Bannon.
“Reflecting the Company’s commitment to free expression, YouTube 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if the company terminated their channels for repeated violations of COVID-19 and elections integrity policies that are no longer in effect,” Donovan wrote.
Donovan also disclosed that the Biden administration pushed Alphabet, Google’s parent company, to create “a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms based on their concerns regarding misinformation.”
“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,” he continued.
“It is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden Administration, attempts to dictate how the Company moderates content,” Donovan added. “And the Company has consistently fought against those efforts on First Amendment grounds.”
Additionally, Donovan also noted that Alphabet appreciates the “accountability” that Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and the rest of the panel are providing through investigations of First Amendment rights violations in the context of social media censorship.
“YouTube takes seriously the importance of protecting free expression and access to a range of viewpoints,” Donovan noted, going on to claim that the platform “never” prohibited users from discussing the origins of COVID-19, and never implemented a “fact-checking program.”
“YouTube values conservative voices on its platform and recognizes that these creators have extensive reach and play an important role in civic discourse.”
YouTube’s reversal of previous bans related to COVID-19 speech “violations” follows a shift similar to Meta, which is the parent company of Facebook.
Last year, Meta revealed that it was getting rid of third-party fact-checkers, which then-President Joe Biden labeled as “really shameful.”
Meta CEO told Jordan in 2021 that “Senior officials” in the Biden administration “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire.”
“Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure,” Zuckerberg added. “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”
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