YouTube announced it will restore thousands of channels that were previously banned for violating its COVID-19 and election integrity policies[1]. This decision came in a 28-page letter from Alphabet to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan on September 23, 2025[2].

The company acknowledged that Biden administration officials had pressured YouTube to remove content “that did not violate its policies,” which Alphabet called “unacceptable and wrong”[1:1][2:1]. YouTube’s current guidelines now permit a “wider range of content” regarding COVID-19 and elections[1:2].

Notable figures who could return include Dan Bongino (now FBI Deputy Director), White House counterterrorism chief Sebastian Gorka, and others who were banned for discussing COVID-19 or election claims[3]. The platform will offer terminated creators a process to rejoin if they were banned for violating policies that are no longer in effect[2:2].

As part of this change, YouTube will also ban the use of official fact-checkers on its platform, instead launching a feature similar to X’s “Community Notes” that allows users to provide context on videos[2:3].


  1. Ars Technica - YouTube will restore channels banned for COVID and election misinformation ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  2. Deseret News - YouTube restores accounts that were censored over COVID-19 and 2020 election claims ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  3. Washington Examiner - YouTube content creators no longer banned over political speech ↩︎

  • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Translation: People pay us to push propaganda that hurts people. The government told us to stop and that hurts our pocketbook!

    Medical misinformation is not political speech. Fuck everyone who made it this way.

  • Korkki@lemmy.ml
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    4 days ago

    The company acknowledged that Biden administration officials had pressured YouTube to remove content “that did not violate its policies,”

    yeah and what prevents them from doing it again for any reason, for any party for anybody.

    • hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      And on no-no words like r*pe. I wanna watch court cases to learn something but lawtube is getting fucked by these inconsistent restrictions. I get that kids shouldn’t watch everything but banning words to force this is not working at all. See Roblox or the countless Minecraft YouTubers involved in ‘bad things’.

      • YellaLeber@sh.itjust.works
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        4 days ago

        This one has really surprised me. I’m not sure when this became so widespread, I guess because of tiktok? I feel like almost every channel I watch the advertiser unfriendly words are censored or are substituted with unalived or something. Pretty unfortunate.

        • hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          And it’s not even like it does anything. People who think it’s important to talk about the topic regardless will just replace the word. Doesn’t take a genius to understand that this does not remedy the heaviness of the topic in any way, so essentially it just makes it sound like explaining world war 2 in Mickey mouse language. It makes a joke out of the topic, that’s what it does. YouTube is making a joke out of those topics.

  • greedytacothief@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 days ago

    Thank god YouTube is finally making some good changes. Clearly dangerous misinformation = good and bad words = bad.

    This is jokes, WTF YouTube