Alphabet blames the Biden administration for its moderation decisions.

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 The platform will offer terminated creators a process to rejoin if they were banned for violating policies that are no longer in effect[2:2].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 ↩︎

  • hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world
    8·
    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
      5·
      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
        1·
        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.