YouTube Opens Door to Return of Some Politically Ejected Users
By deciding to allow back content makers who had been deplatformed due to uploading material related to such topics as COVID-19 and elections, YouTube is "mak[ing] amends to the American people," House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, wrote Tuesday in a thread on X.
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The committee released a letter Tuesday from Alphabet's outside counsel, which said the company will allow content creators the opportunity to return to its YouTube platform after they were kicked off for violating now-gone COVID-19 and election-integrity policies. As of the end of 2024, Alphabet had ended all COVID-19-related content-moderation policies, the company said, and it had previously ended a policy about moderating content dealing with the integrity of U.S. presidential elections in June 2023. The Alphabet letter said multiple YouTube channels were deplatformed through 2023 and 2024 for repeat violations of company policies regarding COVID-19 and election integrity content. YouTube “will provide an opportunity" for creators to rejoin the platform if their channels were terminated for violating those policies, which are no longer in effect.
Alphabet said that during the pandemic, senior Biden administration officials, including White House personnel, pressed YouTube to remove user-generated COVID-19 content that didn't violate YouTube policies. While the administration had concerns about misinformation, "it is unacceptable and wrong when any government ... attempts to dictate how the Company moderates content."
In its letter, Alphabet also complained that the EU's Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act put a disproportionate regulatory burden on U.S. companies. The DSA seems to require that YouTube and other platforms remove lawful content and "may open avenues for substantive regulation of lawful speech."
House Judiciary subpoenaed Alphabet in March, seeking communications between the company and Biden administration, and in a letter, Jordan said there was evidence showing that the federal government "successfully pressured YouTube to censor certain lawful content."