FILE – President Joe Biden speaks to the media in North Charleston, S.C., Jan. 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough, File)
Google admitted President Joe Biden’s administration “pressed” the tech giant and YouTube to censor content the administration felt was COVID-19 “misinformation.” Now, YouTube and Google are calling for conservative voices to “rejoin” if they were booted for violating now-scrapped rules on what users could say about COVID-19 and election integrity.
Company attorney Daniel Donovan shared the jarring admission on Tuesday while speaking to the House Judiciary Committee, and later, in a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-KS).
President Biden and his administration, Donovan wrote, “created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms based on their concerns regarding misinformation.”
He also said:
“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. 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.”
Some notable Republican who were booted from YouTube for violating its rules include Steve Bannon and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, the New York Post noted.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, added it was “unacceptable and wrong” for the Biden Administration to attempt to “dictate” how it policed content, Donovan’s letter said.
Google is not the first Silicon Valley stalwart to admit Biden Administration officials pressured it censor more content. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, said the Biden Administration “basically pushed” his company to censor more COVID-19 posts.
I’m generally like, pretty pro-rolling out vaccines. I think on balance, the vaccines are more positive than negative,” Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan earlier this year.
“But I think that while they’re trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it. And they pushed us super hard to take down things that honestly were true, right?” he continued. “I mean, they basically pushed us and said anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down. And I was just like, ‘Well, we’re not going to do that. We’re clearly not going to do that.’”
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