The outrage flowed righteously on the left when the Trump Administration pressured private companies to suspend anti-Trump TV host Jimmy Kimmel. But there was far less media attention when Google said Tuesday that it will reinstate YouTube accounts that it had banned under pressure from the Biden Administration.
In a letter to House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, a lawyer for Google parent Alphabet disclosed that senior Biden Administration 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.”
Administration officials, including Joe Biden, “created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms based on their concerns regarding misinformation,” the letter said. Alphabet added, in something of a mea not-so-maxima culpa, that “it is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden administration, attempts to dictate how the company moderates content.”
Pressuring private social-media companies to crack down on views the government doesn’t like is much like the pass-through censorship that shut down Jimmy Kimmel. The left’s conviction that Covid “science” about preventive measures was a inviolable truth doesn’t excuse the coercion.
The Biden arm-twisting was in one sense more insidious because it stayed out of public view. Perhaps the White House had a guilty conscience, though more likely it didn’t want voters to know. Nor does the fact that some big tech companies may have been happy to shut down Covid content at the request of their ideological allies in the White House soften the abuse of power.