How Google abandoned facts for ‘free expression’

Google long touted the necessity for factually accurate information on its platforms, but a letter submitted to Congress this week demonstrates how the tech company is shifting to prioritize “free expression.”

The corporate’s YouTube division on Tuesday said it can soon allow accounts that were previously banned for spreading misinformation related to Covid-19 and the 2020 U.S. election to use for reinstatement. The corporate made the announcement through the letter, which was penned by Alphabet lawyer Daniel Donovan and sent to House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.

That announcement effectively rolled back a policy that had treated violations as lifetime bans.

Google’s latest stance comes despite the corporate touting the necessity for accuracy and fact-checking way back to 2016 and throughout the pandemic. During that point, the corporate has used third party fact-checkers and trust and safety teams monitoring misinformation.

Donovan’s letter is the newest backtrack from the corporate that after positioned itself as a bastion for accurate information but is increasingly touting “free expression.” Google is not alone. Meta similarly modified its speech policies in January, just before the second inauguration of President Donald Trump.

YouTube’s latest reinstatement policy comes as Alphabet is under heavy regulatory pressure. The corporate lost back-to-back antitrust cases brought by the Department of Justice related to Google’s dominance in online search and promoting. Google can be in talks with Trump lawyers after a lawsuit stemmed from the suspension of the president’s social media accounts after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Trump filed suits against Facebook, the corporate formerly generally known as Twitter and YouTube later in 2021, and he settled with Meta and X earlier this yr. 

“Google is committed to free expression and works to attach users with a broad range of top of the range, relevant information,” the corporate told CNBC in a press release, adding that it doesn’t depend on external fact checkers for rating content in products like Search or YouTube.

The corporate added that it’s proceed to speculate in latest technologies like SynthID, a watermarking tool that shows when content is AI-generated, and Community Notes, a feature that enables users to annotate content on YouTube with additional context.

Google first ramped up its fact-checking operations ahead of the 2016 U.S. elections.

The corporate had faced growing concerns over misinformation, and false or misleading stories often ranked highly in Search or appearing in Google News.

Alphabet added a fact-checking category to Google News in October 2016. The “Fact Check” tag used this system ClaimReview to spotlight articles from verified fact-checking organizations like PolitiFact and Snopes. With the brand new tag, Google said it wanted “to assist readers find fact checking in major news stories.”

In 2017, Google expanded its “Fact Check” tag globally and to its search results. It showed results from third-party fact-checking organizations that were verified by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) or similar bodies. The very fact-checked tags in search results showed information in regards to the accuracy of a claim, who made the claim and who fact checked the claim.

“Despite the fact that differing conclusions could also be presented, we predict it’s still helpful for people to grasp the degree of consensus around a specific claim and have clear information on which sources agree,” the corporate said on the time.

In 2018, YouTube’s then-CEO Susan Wojcicki said the video service would begin including text boxes with “information cues” on videos that promote conspiracy theories. The boxes would link to third-party sources that debunk the hoaxes in query, CNBC reported on the time.

At a U.S. Congressional testimony that December, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said that users “look to us to supply accurate, trusted information.”

Google’s fact-checking efforts took on greater importance following the Covid-19 outbreak. The corporate faced criticism for misinformation going viral on its properties, including videos on YouTube related to elections, Covid-19 and vaccines.

In an April 2020 blog, Google said more people were coming to YouTube for news, so it will be “expanding fact checks on YouTube to the US.” To do that, YouTube said it will use the data panels introduced in 2018 to link users to details about Covid-19 from sources just like the World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and native health authorities.

“The outbreak of COVID-19 and its spread all over the world has reaffirmed how necessary it’s for viewers to get accurate information during fast-moving events,” it said on the time.

In a May 2020 blog titled “CoronaVirus: How We’re Helping,” Pichai wrote that Google is protecting people from misinformation. 

“Our Trust and Safety team has been working across the clock and across the globe to safeguard our users from phishing, conspiracy theories, malware and misinformation, and we’re consistently looking out for brand new threats,” Pichai wrote. “On YouTube, we’re working to quickly remove any content that claims to forestall the coronavirus instead of looking for medical treatment.”

Still, videos containing inaccurate information began to go viral faster than YouTube could manage by November 2020.

A video titled “Trump won” posted by right-leaning media organization One American News Network on YouTube showed OAN anchor Christina Bobb saying, “President Trump won 4 more years within the office last night.” The video also included unsubstantiated claims of “rampant voter fraud” against Republican ballots and urged viewers to “take motion” against Democrats. The video had greater than 300,000 views before YouTube stopped running ads alongside it.

YouTube doesn’t “allow ads to run on content that undermines confidence in elections with demonstrably false information,” a spokesperson for the service said on the time.

Asked why the video was left up, one other YouTube spokesperson said that the service’s “Community Guidelines” for taking videos down applied to videos that discouraged voting but to not videos that advocate for interference after votes have already been forged.

Later that month, YouTube suspended OAN’s account, saying it was “as a consequence of repeated violations of its Covid-19 misinformation policy and other channel monetization policies.”

Days after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, the corporate suspended Trump’s YouTube account, saying that the outgoing president’s videos violated the service’s policies that prohibit content from inciting violence.

In 2023, Google began changing its tune.

That June, Google said that effective immediately it will stop removing false claims of widespread election fraud within the 2020 presidential race from YouTube.

YouTube said in a blog that it made the choice to balance its twin goals of “protecting our community and providing a house for open discussion and debate.” The choice, which got here ahead of the 2024 mid-term U.S. elections, undid a policy implemented in December 2020 after President Joe Biden won the 2020 U.S. election.  

“In the present environment, we discover that while removing this content does curb some misinformation, it could even have the unintended effect of curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the danger of violence or other real-world harm,” the corporate wrote.

In March 2023, YouTube reinstated Trump’s YouTube channel, allowing him to upload videos once more.

A yr later, Google and YouTube in March 2024 laid off employees from its trust and safety team as a part of broader staff cuts across the corporate. Those cuts got here as others in tech, including Meta, Amazon and the corporate then generally known as Twitter, also reduced the dimensions of their respective trust and safety teams.

The speed of YouTube’s changing speech policies accelerated in 2025.

Google Global Affairs President Kent Walker told a deputy director of the European Commission that it will “pull out of all fact-checking commitments” from its software code before letting its services develop into a code of conduct for the EU’s Digital Services Act, in response to a January report by Axios.

The very fact-checking integration required by the European Commission “simply is not appropriate or effective for our services,” Walker wrote in a letter to the deputy director, in response to the report.

The corporate expanded on this notion in a blog for developers published in June, saying that it will phase out “support for a couple of structured data features in Search,” including the ClaimReview fact-checking snippets.

“Google didn’t inform fact-checkers that the 10-year collaboration was coming to an end, let alone seek the advice of with us on the choice to stop using the fact-checks that we provided at no cost,” wrote Clara Jiménez Cruz, CEO of fact-checking foundation Maldita.es and chair of the European Fact-Checking Standards Network.

Google told CNBC it never integrated fact checking at scale. The corporate added that the phase out of ClaimReview was done as a part of an effort to simplify its Search results page.

In August, YouTube TV signed a multi-year deal with OAN, the identical network it had suspended from YouTube after the 2020 U.S. election.

And with Tuesday’s letter, YouTube said it will allow accounts previously banned for spreading misinformation about Covid-19 and the 2020 U.S. election to use for reinstatement. Amongst channels previously banned under those rules were some related to Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

YouTube on Thursday posted on X saying that previously terminated creators had already begun attempting to create latest channels. It clarified that the brand new policy is a “limited pilot program” that hasn’t formally opened yet.

“YouTube has not and is not going to empower fact-checkers to take motion on or label content across the Company’s services,” Alphabet’s counsel wrote in its letter to Rep. Jordan.

In contrast to the letter, YouTube’s help page as of Thursday says the service will display information panels with links to independent fact checks under videos.

“If a channel is owned by a news publisher that’s funded by a government, or publicly funded, an information panel providing publisher context could also be displayed on the watch page of the videos on its channel,” the assistance page states.

Google said it can proceed to make use of information panels on topics that warrant additional context, similar to videos that debate the moon landing. Google said the panels link to more information but never refute claims made inside a specific video.

Within the letter, Alphabet’s Donovan also wrote that senior Biden administration officials pressed the corporate to remove “non-violative user-generated content.” Donovan wrote that the Biden administration “sought to influence the actions of platforms based on their concerns regarding misinformation.”

“It’s unacceptable and fallacious when any government, including the Biden Administration, attempts to dictate how the Company moderates content,” Donovan wrote. Alphabet “has consistently fought against those efforts on First Amendment grounds.”

Donovan wrote that while YouTube’s reliance on health authorities throughout the pandemic was well intentioned, it “should never come on the expense of public debate.”

In that five-page letter, Alphabet appeared to take a unique tone than it had prior to now. There have been no mentions of accurate, factual or highly-reliable information, but the corporate made several mentions of protecting “free expression.”

“The Company has a commitment to freedom of expression,” Donovan wrote. “This commitment is unwavering and is not going to bend to political pressure.”

The House Judiciary Committee published its own press release alongside the Alphabet letter, writing “Google admits Censorship Under Biden.”

WATCH: Rep. Jim Jordan on Google reinstating banned YouTube accounts, return of Jimmy Kimmel