YouTube has become the latest social media platform to capitulate to the Trump administration. In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, YouTube parent Alphabet said it’ll reinstate channels/accounts that were banned for spreading misinformation about COVID and the 2020 election.
The letter (in which Alphabet said YouTube “values conservative voices on its platform and recognizes that these creators have extensive reach and play an important role in civic discourse”) was a response to an investigation by Republicans into whether the Biden administration pressured platforms to remove certain types of content.
During its four years, the Biden administration did urge platforms and individual content creators to ensure they were sharing accurate, trustworthy information, and asked them to help stop the spread of conspiracy theories and lies about crucial topics like vaccines and medical treatments. The administration held the White House’s first-ever creator summit, where Biden himself gave a speech telling creators misinformation on the internet had “never been this bad before.”
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“It’s getting incredibly difficult to count the number of lies people hear. They don’t know what to believe, they don’t know what to count on. But you break through in ways that I think are going to change the entire dynamic of the way in which we communicate,” he told the ~100 creators in attendance. “That’s why I invited you to the White House.”
YouTube’s policies against COVID misinformation resulted in it taking down or suspending channels belonging to Children’s Health Defense Fund, a group affiliated with current Health and Human Services Secretary/aspiring vaccine eradicator Robert F. Kennedy, and Republican Senator Ron Johnson.
Since Trump re-took office, Republicans have accused social media platforms of bowing to the woke mind virus. Meta was perhaps quickest to ask ‘How high?’ when the new administration said jump: Even before Trump was inaugurated, it axed its fact-checking program and moved its moderation teams from blue California to red Texas.
“We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” Mark Zuckerberg said. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech. So we’re gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
We also heard the “restoring free speech” rallying cry at X, which has become increasingly unmoderated and unhinged since (former) Trump BFF and bankroller Elon Musk took over.
Now, to be clear, YouTube started relaxing its policies around election misinformation back in 2023, when Biden was still in office. It fumbled the handling of election theft claims as the 2020 election was happening, going back and forth for months over what creators were allowed to say. Finally, in June 2023, it decided it would allow videos that outright lied about the results of the 2020 election. (It also changed its hate speech policies this past April, removing “gender identity” as a protected category.)
With this letter, it’s taking things further–and blaming the Biden administration for its earlier, heavier hand.
“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,” Alphabet wrote. “It is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden Administration, attempts to dictate how the Company moderates content.”
As we mentioned above, YouTube’s new policy allows accounts that were permabanned for spreading COVID and/or election lies to be reinstated. It’s not clear how YouTube plans to implement this, but we suspect account holders/creators will have to apply for restoration, as opposed to there being some sort of blanket unbanning.
Alphabet said this decision is part of its “commitment to free expression.”
What does this mean moving forward? Will YouTube allow lies about future elections and medical emergencies to spread across its platform, and therefore across the internet? At what point does its attempt to curry favor with Republicans go from allowing “free expression” to allowing claims that can do material harm to people?
Guess that remains to be seen.
