Alphabet's Letter to the House Judiciary Committee [pdf]

https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/2025-09-23-letter-to-hjc.pdf

12•ImJamal•1h ago

Comments

db48x•1h ago

    8.  Senion 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.
    …
    10. It is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden Administration,
        attempts to influence the actions of platforms based on their concerns regarding
        misinformation.
    …
    23. The Company terminated channels for repeatedly violating its Community Guidelines on
        elections integrity content through 2023 and COVID-19 content through 2024. Today,
        YouTube’s Community Guidelines allow for a wider range of content regarding
        COVID-19 and elections integrity. Reflecting the Community’s commitment to free
        expression, YouTube will provide 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        elections integrity policies that are no longer in effect.

They’re finally acknowledging that they allowed Biden to censor Americans by calling their viewpoints “misinformation”. Viewpoints that later became widely accepted as truth, or as likely to be true.

Fun times. How do we prevent it from happening again?

HankStallone•58m ago

Odd that they're admitting this now, and pretending that they weren't happy to do it at the time.

db48x•38m ago

I don’t think it odd that they are mealy-mouthed about it. They’ve clearly gone through with a thesaurus and picked the least offensive adjectives possible.

HankStallone•25m ago

True, only the first part is odd.

But is anyone going to believe the Biden administration had to strong-arm them into censoring dissenting opinions about Covid? They did it because they were goodthinkers, and all goodthinkers at the time agreed that those opinions were dangerous and should be blocked from the public ear. No one had to make them do it.

I get the feeling a lot of people/companies are going to use Biden as a scapegoat for things they all agreed needed doing.

gruez•2m ago

Maybe it wasn't as direct as the current FCC director's "we can do this the hard way or the easy way", but wasn't there the vague implication that the Biden administration was going to crack down on tech companies for misinformation? At least there was for twitter when it came to the hunter biden laptops.

miltonlost•33m ago

> Viewpoints that later became widely accepted as truth, or as likely to be true.

But they're not true! Why are you celebrating allowing people do misinform and lie?

This is so clearly an attempt by Google to kiss the ring of the Trump administration when Trump et all are the ones who have been clearly censoring and attempting censoring.

Polizeiposaune•42m ago

also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45352258 ("Google Admits Censorship Pressure from Biden Admin, Pledges to Reinstate Accts")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45352213 ("YouTube Will Let Users Booted for Violations of COVID, Elections Policies Rejoin")

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