For years, many of us on the right have maintained that we were being purposely censored.
That went into overdrive during the pandemic, as it was later shown that the Biden administration was ordering outlets to suspend accounts for challenging official COVID-19 information, as well as other subjects.
Google has now openly admitted that it was facing pressure from the Biden administration, with YouTube now welcoming back accounts that had previously been suspended.
If you dared to question anything regarding the COVID-19 vaccine during the Biden years, your social media accounts ran the risk of being banned.
Legitimate questions were being labeled as misinformation, and in September 2021, YouTube announced that accounts posting such misinformation would be banned, and this included the account of now-HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
At the time, YouTube stated, “We’re now at a point where it’s more important than ever to expand the work we started with COVID-19 to other vaccines.”
Of course, as time progressed, some, not all, of these concerns were proven to have been valid, but the accounts were still not reinstated. Keep in mind, some of these accounts were those of real doctors who were raising questions about problems they were seeing with their patients.
Several red states sued the Biden administration for having pressured social media companies to ban these accounts, although the administration denied it was doing so.
The administration insisted it was just raising concerns and leaving it up to the companies to do the right thing.
When the case came before the U.S. Supreme Court, I think it is safe to say that most of us were stunned that the justices ruled in favor of the administration.
The case, however, was not lost on the merits, but rather because the majority found that the states did not have standing to sue over the bans.
Google has now admitted that the Biden administration was indeed pressuring it to put these bans in place, stating, “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.”
The statement continued, “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.”
YouTube is now welcoming back those accounts that were suspended at the time, saying that the restrictions put in place are no longer valid, so those content creators are welcome back to the platform.
The full statement by Google is damning proof of blatant overreach and a violation of free speech in this country, and that is exactly why I am hoping that President Donald Trump stays out of this Jimmy Kimmel controversy. That is not going to happen, however, as Trump has already taken the bait, threatening ABC’s license, something for which Kimmel blasted the president during his second night back on the air.
