Google has indicated that it plans to restore YouTube content creators who were banned for violating the platform’s past political speech policies, the House Judiciary Committee announced on Tuesday.
Under the Biden administration, Google targeted conservative accounts for covering politically divisive topics, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 presidential election.
A lawyer for Google’s parent company admitted the Biden administration exerted its executive authority, pressuring the tech company to censor people and remove certain content in a new letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
“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,” Alphabet counsel Daniel Donovan wrote.
“While the Company continued to develop and enforce its policies independently, Biden Administration officials continued to press the Company to remove non-violative user-generated content.”
The lawyer called the Biden White House’s censorship pressure “unacceptable and wrong,” adding that Google “has consistently fought against those efforts on First Amendment grounds.”
Google’s statement came as a result of Jordan’s March 6 subpoena to Google as part of his investigation into the company, according to a Judiciary Committee press release.
In the letter, Google committed itself to protecting free expression and applying its community guidelines and terms of service “equally to all users” and “to all types of content, regardless of the viewpoints expressed.”
Google removed channels for violating its policies on election-related content through 2023 and COVID-19 content through 2024, Donovan said.
The company has since overhauled its policies that unfairly targeted political speech.
“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if the company terminated their channels for repeated violations of COVID-19 and elections integrity policies that are no longer in effect,” the letter reads.
The Washington Examiner contacted Google for further comment.
Among the top conservative figures who were removed from YouTube are now-Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, and current Trump deputy assistant Sebastian Gorka. Each of them was permanently banned for speaking on alleged misinformation about COVID-19 or the 2020 election, which President Donald Trump claimed was rigged against him.
Bannon, in particular, was accused of inciting violence against then-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci and then-FBI Director Christopher Wray in 2020. He was subsequently punished by YouTube and Twitter.
When asked for comment by the Washington Examiner about Google’s move to reinstate banned accounts, Bannon offered a direct message to those who censored him: “Google oligarchs, go f*** yourself — our mission is to destroy you.”
It remains to be seen whether previously banned content creators take up Google on its offer to return to the video platform. Bannon’s War Room podcast started posting content on YouTube again earlier this year. Its last video was from two weeks ago.
While some accounts have been removed from the site, others have had their videos deleted.
This was the case for right-wing commentator Tim Pool, whose video featuring Alex Jones and Joe Rogan was removed. He requested that YouTube restore the episode after Tuesday’s news.
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“The episode was banned 3 years after airing for incredibly dubious reasons related to ‘medical misinformation,'” Pool posted on X.
Later on his show, he asked whether YouTube would start removing antifa content for promoting violence in line with the platform’s “violent extremist or criminal organizations policy.” Trump recently designated antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization.”
