The forces of free expression have announced another victory in the war against Big Tech censorship.
This week, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, publicized a letter from representatives of Alphabet, Inc. – the parent company of Google and YouTube – pledging to reinstate content creators who had been deplatformed for political speech. The letter confirmed that massive amounts of user-generated content had been censored at the behest of the Biden administration even when that content didn’t violate the platform’s policies.
The letter and its shocking revelations mark just the latest instance of Big Tech companies belatedly acknowledging that they colluded with the government to chill speech and shut down conversations that the Biden White House didn’t like.
The letter explicitly states, “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… 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.”
The Judiciary Committee also issued a press release itemizing these admissions from Alphabet:
- The Biden Administration pressured Google to censor Americans and remove content that did not violate YouTube’s policies.
- The Biden Administration’s censorship pressure was “unacceptable and wrong.”
- Public debate should never come at the expense of relying on “authorities.”
- The company will never use third-party “fact-checkers.”
As to Alphabet’s claim to have fought against censorship “on First Amendment grounds,” that isn’t how it looked to the deplatformed creators. According to the committee’s press release, “These major admissions come after Chairman Jordan’s subpoena to Google and a years-long investigation into the company.”
In other words, were it not for pressure from congressional Republicans, Alphabet would almost certainly have kept quiet about pressure from the Biden administration to censor disfavored speech. Why all the secrecy if Alphabet didn’t have something to hide – like, say, the fact that they complied with the White House’s requests?
Jordan has been a free speech crusader since he became Chairman of the Judiciary Committee in 2023, after the GOP won control of the House. He has made targeting Big Tech platforms and their censorship operations a top priority.
In March 2023, he held hearings on the notorious “Twitter Files” under the auspices of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Elon Musk had just bought Twitter (now X) and discovered that a large department of the company was exclusively devoted to processing “requests” from government officials to “moderate” content. (In Big Tech parlance, “moderate” just means “censor”).
Musk then granted journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger access to investigate these files. They subsequently testified before Jordan’s subcommittee. Taibbi succinctly described what they found as follows:
“We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation “requests” from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.”
These revelations added impetus to Chairman Jordan’s active investigations into Facebook, Google, and other Big Tech companies. Because Big Tech companies slow-walked voluntary responses to information requests from the Judiciary Committee, Jordan subpoenaed the chief executive officers of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft for documents and communications relating to the federal government’s reported collusion with Big Tech to suppress free speech.
At length, Facebook produced the subpoenaed documents, and Chairman Jordan took to X in July of 2023 and posted the damning evidence they revealed: “Never-before-released internal documents subpoenaed by the Judiciary Committee PROVE that Facebook and Instagram censored posts and changed their content moderation policies because of unconstitutional pressure from the Biden White House.” This had been going on since 2021 when the Biden administration wanted to silence dissent concerning its COVID-19 policies.
A year later, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg admitted on Joe Rogan’s podcast that Biden administration officials pressured the platform to censor content on COVID-19. He also acknowledged that Facebook was wrong to censor content on the infamous Hunter Biden laptop ahead of the 2020 election.
Zuckerberg then apologized for censoring this content in a widely circulated letter:
“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree…I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”
The White House pressure on Facebook was by no means limited to unnamed staffers – the scandal included the man in the Oval Office. As Jordan has noted, “In July 2021, President Biden publicly denounced Facebook and other social media platforms, claiming they were ‘killing people’ by not censoring alleged ‘misinformation.’”
In January 2025, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was closing its “fact-checking” operation in the United States and replacing it with a user-generated “Community Notes” system similar to the tool now used by X. This brings us back to YouTube which, as noted above, has pledged that it “will never use third-party ‘fact-checkers.’” YouTube will also provide an opportunity for all creators to rejoin the platform if their channels were terminated for “violations of COVID-19 and election integrity policies that are no longer in place.”
So, where does all this leave us? By the beginning of 2022, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube had all created sophisticated censorship operations designed to silence anyone who failed to parrot Biden regime propaganda. After Elon Musk bought Twitter and the Republican House majority took office in 2023, conservatives collectively declared war on the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” and they have won important battles. Alphabet is the latest to surrender.
But the war is far from over. Big Tech and its Democrat allies are biding their time until Republicans are out of power and they no longer have the spotlight of government investigations on them. Then we will really see how much contrition Silicon Valley is willing to display for deciding who does and does not have First Amendment rights online.
David Catron is a Senior Editor at the American Spectator. His writing has also appeared in PJ Media, the American Thinker, the Providence Journal, the Catholic Exchange and a variety of other publications.
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