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Those who saw their YouTube videos and other content banned during COVID-19 and the 2020 election were invited back to the platform Tuesday in an astonishing mea culpa from the company that blamed their censorship on Biden administration pressure tactics.

Alphabet Inc., the company that operates Google and YouTube, wrote in a letter Tuesday to Congress that they were forced into removing content by Mr. Biden and his senior aides.

“It is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden administration, attempts to dictate how the company moderates content,” Alphabet’s lawyers wrote to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan. “And the company has consistently fought against those efforts on First Amendment grounds.”

Company officials acknowledged they had gone too far in banning content related to the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 presidential election results.

Their censorship came mostly in response to senior Biden administration officials who repeatedly pressured them to take down content even though the material did not violate the company’s policies.

Company officials said Biden administration aides and President Biden “created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms based on their concerns regarding misinformation.”

Google also admitted to relying on “health authorities” when it initiated policies, kept in place through 2024, that banned certain discussions of COVID-19 policies and various treatments for the virus.

Those actions, Alphabet officials said in a letter to Mr. Jordan from their law firm, were “well-intentioned,” but they added, “The Company recognizes it should never come at the expense of public debate on these important issues.”

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In June 2023, YouTube removed a video of popular podcast host Jordan Peterson interviewing Mr. Kennedy, who was then a presidential candidate. YouTube representatives said at the time that they removed the video “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.”

Mr. Bongino was permanently banned from YouTube in January 2022 after posting two videos that cast doubt on mask-wearing to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Alphabet officials said in the letter to Mr. Jordan that they’ll offer those banned from YouTube due to COVID-19 or election-related content “an opportunity … to rejoin the platform.”

The Biden administration has been under intense criticism over its tactics to pressure social media platforms to remove content. In addition to Alphabet, Biden aides bore down on Facebook and Twitter, now X, to force the companies to censor social media posts related to the election and the COVID-19 pandemic, according to emails uncovered by Mr. Jordan.

The effort began almost as soon as Mr. Biden entered the White House with a Jan. 23, 2021, email from Clarke Humphrey, then the digital director for the administration’s COVID-19 response team.

Mr. Humphrey emailed Twitter officials at 1 a.m. on Mr. Biden’s third day in office and asked them to remove a tweet posted a day earlier by Mr. Kennedy that suggested the death of Hank Aaron, 86, may have been tied to the coronavirus vaccine.

Aides threatened the social media giants with unspecified “options” if the platforms did not comply with their censorship demands.

In a now-dismissed lawsuit filed by two states against the Biden administration, U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty called their actions “arguably the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.”

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Google admitted earlier this week that its COVID-era censorship policies were enacted at the explicit behest of the Biden administration, and the company now says it will allow any content creator that was silenced for this reason to return to YouTube. This is a massive win for free speech, as well as an acknowledgement that those of us who objected to the government bullying tech companies were right all along.

This new policy was announced in response to an inquiry by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, who asked Google for information about moderation decisions the company made during the Biden years. In response, Alphabet, the parent company of Google, said in a statement that: “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.”

Alphabet’s statement goes on to accuse the Biden administration of creating a “political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms based on their concerns regarding misinformation.”

Alphabet also notes that it has already revised its election integrity policies, which had led to the removal of content from YouTube. With this similar admission about the harms caused by the COVID policy, YouTube is now welcoming all creators terminated under such policies back to the platform.

Lest you think that means a bunch of crazy conspiracy theorists are coming back, consider this: Long-time viewers probably remember, but this channel, The Hill, was previously suspended for a week for allegedly breaking a rule that YouTube now admits was wrong.

What am I talking about? In March 2022, we were informed that we had violated an election integrity policy by posting false information about the 2020 election, because we had played video footage on the show of Donald Trump saying the election was stolen. We didn’t say the election was stolen; we reported the fact that Trump had said it. Think how crazy that is — under YouTube’s previous policy, they couldn’t distinguish between Trump saying something and a news channel reporting that he had said something.

Here’s me and my co-hosts at the time, Ryan Grim and Kim Iversen, talking about what happened to us after we had served our one-week stint in time-out.

Now, more than three years later, I actually don’t blame YouTube as much for this kind of thing, even though it was wrong and crazy. We now know that this platform, as well as Twitter/X, Facebook and all the rest, faced relentless pressure to censor speech that dissented from the perspective of the Biden administration, particularly on COVID and the 2020 election. It was jawboning — the term we use to describe government figures trying to push companies to take some action — and it was wrong.

Of course, many in the mainstream media are suddenly very, very worried about jawboning. They are extremely worried about the Trump administration pressuring private media companies to do — well, exactly what the Biden administration did. Here was Jake Tapper, for instance, reacting to Jimmy Kimmel getting temporarily taken off the air, calling it “pretty much the most direct infringement by the government on free speech that I’ve seen in my lifetime.”

Now, to be clear, I agree that jawboning is a bad problem. I think the FCC should have stayed out of the Kimmel issue. But let’s not pretend this is the first time that this has ever happened. Thanks to pressure from the federal government when it was run by Democrats, social media giants engaged in vast censorship. The shoe is on the other foot now, and that’s wrong too. But maybe more mainstream liberals should have taken notice when it was happening to us.

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