‘It is unacceptable and wrong when…’: Google says Biden administration pressed it to remove COVID-19 content from YouTube, writes 28-page letter

Google has said that the Biden administration pressed the company to “remove non-violative user-generated content” which was “related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate its policies.” The claim was made in a letter sent to the House Judiciary Committee by the counsel for Alphabet, Google’s parent company.“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,” Google said in a 28-page letter.The House Committee on the Judiciary shared the letter on its official website.According to the company, it had to take to balance freedom of expression with responsibility.“The COVID-19 pandemic was an unprecedented time in which online platforms had to reach decisions about how best to balance freedom of expression with responsibility, including responsibility with respect to the moderation of user-generated content that could result in real world harm,” the company said in the letter addressing Jim Jordan, Chairman of Committee on the Judiciary, on September 23.The company said that “senior Biden Administration officials, including White House officials, conducted repeated and sustained outreach to Alphabet and pressed the Company regarding certain user-generated content related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate its policies.”“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 added.“As online platforms, including Alphabet, grappled with these decisions, the Administration's officials, including President Biden, created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms based on their concerns regarding misinformation,” the letter further added.Last year in August, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, stated in a letter to the same committee that his platform was forced to make COVID-19-related changes “in the wake of this pressure.” He added that it ‘expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree’.