In a letter to U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Alphabet, the company that owns Google and YouTube, confessed that the Biden administration pressed the company to censor “misinformation.”
The letter from the company’s attorney also said YouTube would restore posting privileges to those kicked off the platform for questioning the Covid-19 “pandemic” narrative and the integrity of elections, notably the 2020 election that supposedly delivered more than 80 million votes to Joe Biden.
The admission comes pursuant to a subpoena and a committee probe into the company’s working with the Biden administration to shut down conservative voices.
The company received a letter from Jordan in March, to which the subpoena was attached.
“During the 118th Congress, our oversight uncovered how the Biden-Harris Administration repeatedly pressured online platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, and Amazon, to censor Americans directly and by proxy,” Jordan wrote:
Following this oversight, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, admitted that it was wrong to bow to the Biden-Harris Administration’s demands, publicly committed to restoring free speech on its platforms, and reformed its policies.
Alphabet … has not similarly disavowed the Biden-Harris Administration’s attempts to censor speech. To inform legislative reforms to protect Americans’ civil liberties, the Committee must fully understand the extent and nature of the Biden-Harris Administration’s censorship efforts.
The committee uncovered information that YouTube directly helped the administration’s “censorship regime,” Jordan added, and the administration “successfully pressured YouTube to censor certain lawful content” that did not trespass the platform’s policies.
Jordan released the letter from Alphabet attorney Daniel F. Donovan of King and Spalding today.
“Senior” Biden administration and White House officials “conducted repeated and sustained outreach” and “pressed” the company about material that did not violate company policies, Donovan explained:
While the company continued to develop and enforce its policies independently, Biden Administration officials continued to press the company to remove non violative of user-generated content.
As online platforms, including Alphabet, grappled with these decisions, the administration’s officials, including President Biden, created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms based on their concerns regarding misinformation.
Remarkably, Donovan also admitted that the administration efforts were “unacceptable and wrong,” and that Alphabet “consistently fought” the Biden censorship regime on “First Amendment grounds.”
EMBED Letter
The letter also admitted that YouTube shut down material regarding Covid-19, but that the platform has not and will not allow “fact-checkers” to monitor or control content.
Noting that YouTube values a “diversity of perspectives,” the letter said the platform “sunsetted a policy to allow for discussion of possible widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurring in the 2020 and past U.S. presidential elections.”
“The company terminated channels for repeatedly violating its community guidelines on elections integrity content through 2023 and COVID-19 content through 2024,” the letter confessed:
Today, YouTube’s community guidelines allow for a wider range of content regarding COVID-19 and elections integrity. Reflecting the company’s commitment to free speech, 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.
YouTube values conservative voices … and recognizes that those creators have extensive reach and play an important role in civic discourse.
YouTube was just one of the Biden administration’s targets for censorship. Twitter, now X, was another, as the files released by Elon Musk after he bought the company showed.
Indeed, the effort to silence conservatives on Twitter included the FBI and Pentagon.
“The files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government — from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA,” journalist Matt Taibbi reported.
Apparently, the government was so worried about what Taibbi reported that the Internal Revenue Service showed up at his home the day he testified before Jordan’s committee.
“The Committee has learned that while Mr. Taibbi was describing his findings of government abuse and civil liberties violations, an IRS revenue officer appeared at Mr. Taibbi’s personal residence in New Jersey — leaving a note for Mr. Taibbi to call the IRS four days later,” Jordan wrote to IRS chief Daniel Werfel.
The IRS, it turned out, had rejected Taibbi’s 2018 and 2021 tax returns because of possible “identity theft,” although in the years since then, the agency didn’t tell Taibbi or his accountant about any such concerns. Instead, it waited “until the day he was testifying before Congress,” Jordan wrote.
Taibbi told the committee that the internet was supposed to “democratize the exchange of information globally.” The Twitter files disclosed “a sweeping effort” to stop that exchange by using “machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control.”
Worse still, Taibbi continued, “our own government appears to be playing a lead role.”
As Alphabet’s attorney has confessed, “our own government” was the Biden administration, which pushed YouTube to censor material just as it pushed Twitter to do likewise.