Another Big Tech has taken the road to Damascus, which has become a leading destination among Silicon Valley tycoons after Donald Trump’s victory in the US elections. Like Meta in recent months, Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, also admitted to having eliminated content related to the pandemic and the results of the 2020 US elections, following strong political pressure from the Democratic administration of then President Joe Biden, even when the removed content did not violate the platform’s rules.
The confession, contained in a letter sent by the giant’s lawyers to the Republican congressman and president of the Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan, follows a multi-year investigation into online censorship of conservative-oriented content. The letter is eloquent: «Senior officials of the Biden administration, including White House officials, repeatedly contacted Alphabet and pressured the company on certain user-generated content on the Covid-19 pandemic that did not violate our policies», reads the text signed by lawyer Daniel F. Donovan, which defines «unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden administration, seeks to dictate how the company moderates content, and the company has consistently fought these efforts on First Amendment grounds.”
How the company fought against the imposed gagging and in defense of the Constitution is not known, however in the letter sent to Congress we also read that YouTube has «closed channels for having repeatedly violated the Community guidelines on the regularity of elections and on Covid between 2023 and 2024», but today the rules «allow a wider range of contents» on these issues and therefore, «reflecting the commitment of the company’s free expression policy, YouTube will provide the opportunity for creators to return to the platform if the company has terminated their accounts.”
Alphabet then invited the users it had kicked out to return to the platforms, saying it intended to restore some of the deleted material. Whether it is a sincere repentance or an opportunistic change of attitude, this U-turn is yet another confirmation of the permeability of social platforms to political pressure, as well as the control and manipulation they can exercise on billions of users.
A topic that also concerns the role of Big Tech in defining the boundaries of freedom of expression, which has become crucial in the States (much less in the EU) following Mark Zuckerberg’s revelations. The owner of Meta (which controls Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger), after the defeat of the Democrats, spilled the beans last year. In a letter sent to the House of Representatives, he admitted that he had been “pressured” by Biden’s government to censor virus-related content during the pandemic, saying he “regretted” the company’s decision to comply with the requests.
“In 2021, senior Biden administration officials, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor some Covid-19-related content, even humorous or satirical content, and expressed frustration with our teams when we disagreed,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I believe that the government’s pressure was wrong and I regret not having been more explicit about it”, he added, specifying that he had made some choices in that situation “that we would not make again today”.
A sensational conversion, given the role of guardian of the truth against fake news assumed by the platform in recent years. In just over 12 months, between 2020 and 2021, Facebook removed more than 20 million pieces of content. The cleaver didn’t just concern Covid: in October 2020, in the midst of the presidential election campaign at the time, Facebook and the former Twitter (now
The peak of Dem government control, however, was reached when the Biden administration launched anti-Covid vaccinations. Zuck himself said it in conversation with Joe Rogan, host of the most followed podcast in the world, Joe Rogan Experience. «They pressured us very hard to eliminate things that, honestly, were true. They told us: anything that claims that vaccines could have side effects, you must eliminate it.” However, the CEO of Meta was not only referring to conspiracy content, with bizarre or extreme theories about vaccines. The White House, in fact, pushed Facebook to censor even joking memes. Without forgetting, obviously, the total ban on the theory of the virus leaking from the Wuhan laboratory. Hypothesis today considered probable.
During the interview with the blogger, the former young nerd even went so far as to say that at a certain point his company’s fact checking became “something similar to 1984”, taking “a slippery slope”. A sensitivity that, however, did not prevent him from obeying the orders of the White House. As did the former CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey. In fact, before Zuckerberg, it was Elon Musk who revealed the persistent government control over the platforms. A few months after the purchase of the social network “A new investigation into Twitter files reveals that teams of Twitter employees create blacklists, block unwanted tweets from trending, and limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics — all in secret, without informing users,” former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss wrote about it.
For example, Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford and author of the Great Barrington Declaration, a document published in October 2020 which suggested a targeted protection policy for the elderly and frail and opposed mass restrictions, such as lockdowns for young people and people without pre-existing conditions, ended up on the black list. The Facebook page linked to the document was also closed the day after its opening, February 4, 2021: according to the so-called fact checkers “it violated community standards”. Anthony Fauci, immunologist, former White House consultant and hawk of pandemic restrictions, for whom the scientific evidence of the anti-lockdown document was “dangerous”, also worked to silence the luminary and the other scientific personalities who had signed his appeal. To confirm the break with the past, promised since the election campaign by Trump, Bhattacharya was chosen by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in November 2024 to lead the National Institutes of Health.
Alphabet is therefore only the latest Big Tech to make a (timid) mea culpa. Furthermore, in the letter sent to Congress, the company launched a harsh invective against the European Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU regulation created with the aim of promoting the fundamental rights of users, as well as fair competition between online platforms, and “creating a safer and more transparent digital environment”, but which in fact gives the EU Commission the power to “moderate” posts in the event of a “crisis”. “These rules,” Alphabet writes, “impose a disproportionate regulatory burden on American companies, and Alphabet has long expressed concern about the risk that the DSA could pose to free expression within and outside the European Union based on how certain rules might be applied.”
A legitimate fear, in the name of transparency and freedom of expression. Which Big Tech rediscovered only after the defeat of the US Democrats. Better late than never.
