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A roster of high-profile conservative voices could soon return to YouTube.
YouTube's parent company, Alphabet, said in a letter published Tuesday that it intends to "provide an opportunity for all creators to rejoin the platform" whose accounts had been terminated over repeated violations of its COVID-19 and election integrity policies.
The letter, written by Alphabet lawyer Daniel Donovan to Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, said that YouTube "values conservative voices on its platform" and recognized their reach and role in civic discourse. (Read the letter in full below.)
The House Judiciary Committee published the letter on its website on Tuesday following its monthslong investigation into whether Biden White House officials pressured Big Tech platforms into censoring content. A Google spokesperson confirmed the authenticity of the letter.
YouTube's about-face on previously banned accounts marks the latest shift in Big Tech content moderation. Companies from Meta to X have overhauled their content policies and switched away from using third-party fact-checkers.
Prominent YouTube channels from conservative creators — including Dan Bongino, Steve Bannon, and Children's Health Defense, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s nonprofit activist group, as well as those from lesser-known creators — had been banned from YouTube for flouting its COVID-19 misinformation and election-related policies. Bongino has since become the deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, while Kennedy leads the Department of Health and Human Services.
Google's lawyer said in the letter published Tuesday that YouTube had ended all of its stand-alone, COVID-19-related policies by December 2024 and retired a separate policy regarding election integrity in 2023 to "allow for discussion of possible widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurring in the 2020 and other past U.S. Presidential elections."
The letter didn't go into detail about how previously banned creators could resume their terminated channels or whether their content would be monetized and therefore eligible to get a cut of ad revenue.
Google, via its @UpdatesFromYT X account, later clarified that it is planning a pilot program that would be available to a "subset of creators" who have been suspended from YouTube — in addition to accounts that were kicked off for violating COVID-19 or election-misinformation policies that have since been deprecated.
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