Senior officials in the Biden administration, including some White House officials, "conducted repeated and sustained outreach" and "pressed" Google- and YouTube parent-company Alphabet "regarding certain user-generated content related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate [Alphabet's] policies," the company revealed yesterday.
While Alphabet "continued to develop and enforce its policies independently, Biden Administration officials continued to press [Alphabet] to remove non-violative user-generated content," a lawyer for Alphabet wrote in a September 23 letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan. Administration officials including Biden "created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions" of private tech platforms regarding the moderation of misinformation.
The company will now restore the accounts of certain content creators removed as part of efforts to tamp down on misinformation related to COVID-19 or the 2020 presidential election. "YouTube will prove 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if the Company terminated their channels for repeated violations of COVID-19 and elections integrity policies that are no longer in effect," the letter said.
