YouTube slams Biden administration, reinstates conservative accounts banned for COVID falsehoods

YouTube is reinstating the accounts of conservative creators previously banned from the platform for spreading misinformation, after facing a months-long investigation by the House Judiciary Committee.

In a five-page letter sent to the committee’s chair Jim Jordan, YouTube’s parent company Alphabet said the platform had removed said accounts due to pressure from Biden administration officials in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that it would now commit further to promoting political debate on the site.

Many accounts ran by conservative figures were banned for violating platform policies on misinformation, including those of Sebastian Gorka, Dan Bongino, Steve Bannon, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nonprofit Children’s Health Defense. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as the current head of the Department of Health and Human Services, has most recently come under fire for promoting unfounded claims on the cause of autism and undermining vaccine science. Bannon, former chief strategist for the Trump campaign and current ally, recently pled guilty to defrauding donors in a campaign to build a border wall. Bongino is now the deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, while Gorka is the White House counterterrorism chief.

The letter seems to claim the Biden administration “created a political atmosphere” that forced the platform to remove content and accounts that they wouldn’t have otherwise removed under existing content moderation policies, even though YouTube had revised its policies in response to a wave of COVID-19 conspiracy theories and anti-vaccination sentiment at the time — many other platforms joined their efforts. In a press release issued shortly after, the House Judiciary Committee equated this to an admittance of political censorship. In 2024, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made similar claims against the administration after facing intense criticism for Facebook’s handling of medical misinformation.

“The company is committed to doing its part to continue to keep the digital ecosystem safe, reliable, and open to free expression,” wrote Alphabet. “It is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden administration, attempts to dictate how [Alphabet] moderates content.”

Many tech companies, including Meta, X, and Google-owned YouTube, have eagerly acquiesced to the Trump administration’s free speech demands, including axing human content moderation teams, revising hateful conduct policies, and reinstating formerly banned accounts. For years, YouTube and Meta have come under fire for their platforms’ roles in spreading misinformation, and while many changes had been implemented to curb such content, recent political decisions have seen them rolling back much of that progress.