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

In a letter Before a House committee last month, the legal counsel for Alphabet, YouTube’s parent company, claimed that President Joe Biden’s administration sought to “influence” the company to crack down on misinformation about Covid-19. Republicans celebrated the letter as an apparent admission of Democratic censorship.

But Democrats appear to be throwing cold water on these allegations. In a new letter to YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, first reported by WIRED, Jamie Raskin, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, shares half a dozen excerpts from transcripts with 20 Alphabet employees. According to the letter, none of them claim to have ever been pressured to remove or remove content at the request of the Biden administration. The interviews result from several years of conversations with YouTube employees focused on politics and health, as well as trust and safety roles; They appear to counter years of GOP accusations that the Biden administration was censoring social media platforms during the pandemic.

“As thousands of pages of testimony transcripts clearly show, only one “Alphabet employees have testified to any coercion or undue pressure from the Biden administration,” Jamie Raskin, the committee’s top Democrat, said in the letter. “Are you claiming that all of these witnesses lied or misled the committee?” Is it more likely that these 20 witnesses got together to plan and provide false testimony or that you wrote an unsworn letter contradicting them all to appease President Trump and his minions?

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

“Jim Jordan’s quest to find evidence of a censorship regime that never existed is in its third year, and he continues to suppress testimony from scores of witnesses that contradict his fantasy,” says Renée DiResta, a disinformation expert and associate research professor at Georgetown University.

A week after Alphabet’s lawyer sent that letter to the committee in September, claiming to have 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 after the Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol (YouTube, which paid $24.5 million, admitted no wrongdoing in the settlement).