Alphabet Admits to YouTube Deplatforming, Promises to Never Do It Again

Pins Blame for Censorship on Biden Administration

​Alphabet’s recent letter to Rep. Jim Jordan, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, was nothing short of a white-flag surrender from the world’s most prolific social media company.

Yes, Google’s parent company, which also owns YouTube, finally admitted what conservatives have said all along – the Biden administration leaned on social media companies to censor conservative voices.

Here’s the money quote:

“[A]dministration officials, including President Biden, created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms based on their concerns regarding misinformation.”

And then this stunner:

“It is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden Administration, attempts to dictate how the Company moderates content, and the Company has consistently fought against those efforts on First Amendment grounds.”

Translation: The White House bullied us, and we caved.

As we’ve reported, that administration used quiet coercion to remove conservative content, ranging from reviews of content by eighty FBI agents, to taxpayer-funded efforts to quietly dissuade companies from running ads in conservative and libertarian news sites and magazines, to White House officials picking up the phone and screaming at senior people at Meta.

Alphabet now vows to accept deplatformed speakers:

“No matter the political atmosphere, YouTube will continue to enable free expression on its platform, particularly as it relates to issues subject to political debate.”

The company affirmed that it has never run a “fact-checking program,” one way in which biased advice prompted Twitter and Facebook to shut down speech during the censorship era. It pledged never to use fact-checkers.

So what should we make of this sudden confession?

First, it sometimes pays to be paranoid. The many conservatives who complained about vanishing content were not crazy. Second, credit Chairman Jordan for pressuring Alphabet to admit its censorship and to speak openly about behind-the-scenes pressure from government. Third, we are not out of the woods yet.

The danger of government pressure leading to censorship is greater than ever. It comes now not from “jawboning” officials in Washington, D.C., but from actors in Brussels and the European Union.

Alphabet wrote that the EU’s Digital Services Act “could be interpreted in such a way as to require Alphabet and other providers of intermediary services to remove lawful content, jeopardizing the companies’ ability to develop and enforce global policies that support rights to free expression and access to information.”
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That’s the next battleground, and it is one in which liberals and conservatives should join forces to defend American speech from foreign censorship.

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