Republicans Claimed Biden Censored YouTube. 20 Employees Seem to Say Otherwise

In a message Before a House committee last month, legal counsel for Alphabet, YouTube’s parent company, claimed that President Joe Biden’s administration sought to “influence” the company to eliminate misinformation about the coronavirus. Republicans celebrated the letter as a clear acknowledgment of Democratic oversight.

But Democrats seem to be throwing 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 shared six excerpts of texts with 20 Alphabet employees. According to the letter, none of them claimed to have been pressured to suppress or remove content at the request of the Biden administration. The interviews come after several years of conversations with YouTube employees that focused on politics, health, and the roles of trust and safety; It appears to undermine years of GOP accusations of the Biden administration of censoring social media platforms during the pandemic.

“As thousands of pages of testimony transcripts make clear, no one “Alphabet employees testified about any coercion or undue pressure from the Biden administration,” Jamie Raskin, the committee’s top Democrat, says in the letter. “Do you now assert that all of these witnesses lied to or misled the committee?” Is it more likely that all 20 of these witnesses came together to plan and give false testimony or did you write an undivided letter contradicting them all to appease President Trump and his servants?

Release of the full transcripts would need to be approved by Republicans on the committee, a Democratic spokesperson told WIRED. (Congressman Jim Jordan’s office did not respond to a request for comment. He is the GOP leader of the committee.)

“Jim Jordan’s quest to find evidence of a censorship system that never existed is now in its third year, and he continues to suppress the testimony of many, many witnesses who contradict his fiction,” says Rene DiResta, a disinformation expert and associate research professor at Georgetown University.

A week after a lawyer on behalf of Alphabet sent that letter to the committee in September claiming it had been pressured by the Biden administration, YouTube agreed to dismiss and settle a lawsuit involving the suspension of President Donald Trump’s account on the platform following the US Capitol riot on January 6 (YouTube, which paid $24.5 million, admitted no wrongdoing in the settlement).