Republicans claimed that Biden censored YouTube. 20 employees seem to say otherwise
in a letter In a House committee hearing last month, legal counsel for Alphabet, YouTube’s parent company, alleged that President Joe Biden’s administration sought to “influence” the company to crack down on Covid-19 misinformation. Republicans celebrated the letter as an open admission of Democratic censorship.
But the Democrats seem to be cold water on these accusations. In a new letter to YouTube CEO Neil Mohan, first reported by WIRED, House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin shares half a dozen excerpts from transcripts with 20 Alphabet employees. According to the letter, none of them claim they were pressured to suppress or remove content at the behest of the Biden administration. These interviews come from several years of conversations with YouTube employees focusing on policy and health, and in the role of trust and safety. They appear to undermine years of accusations by the Biden administration about censorship of social media platforms during the pandemic.
As thousands of pages of transcripts of testimony make clear, no a unit “An Alphabet employee testified about any coercion or undue pressure from the Biden administration,” the committee’s top Democrat, Jamie Raskin, said in the letter. Is it more likely that all 20 witnesses got together to plan and give perjury, or that you wrote an unsworn letter contradicting all of them to appease President Trump and his minions?
A Democratic spokesman told WIRED that release of the full text would have to be approved by Republicans on the committee. (The office of Congressman Jim Jordan did not respond to a request for comment. He is the committee’s GOP leader.)
“Jim Jordan’s quest for evidence of a censorship regime that never existed is now in its third year, and he continues to suppress the testimony of many witnesses who contradict his fantasy,” claims Rene Di Resta, a disinformation expert and research assistant professor at Georgetown University.
YouTube agreed to dismiss a lawsuit alleging the suspension of President Donald Trump’s account on the platform after the Jan. 6 congressional riots (YouTube, which paid $24.5 million, did not accept the settlement), a week after counsel for Alphabet sent the committee a letter in September alleging pressure from the Biden administration.
