Emails show White House and YouTube worked together to censor alleged “misinformation” about COVID-19 and vaccines

Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), who serves as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, revealed to the public unpublished conversations that Biden Administration officials had with YouTube staff to censor Americans’ opinions on COVID-19 and the vaccines, branded as “misinformation.”

According to the emails, the former White House Director of Digital Strategy, Rob Flaherty, who is now working on Biden’s 2024 reelection bid as deputy campaign manager, sent an email to Google team members in April 2021 to “connect […] about the work you’re doing to combat vaccine hesitancy, but also crack down on vaccine misinformation.”

During the conversations, Flaherty directly asked YouTube about disinformation trends on the social network related to COVID-19 and offered help from the federal government to work on regulating supposedly inaccurate or false audiovisual content.

The White House, in tune with their demands, offered its COVID experts to partner with YouTube officials.

Jordan explained that, privately, YouTube understood that the White House’s demands through Flaherty were a way to impose greater restrictions on content on the platform.

According to the Republican, on April 21, 2021, one of the members of Google’s Government Affairs team, who had had recent calls with Flaherty, explained that the former White House official was focused not only on YouTube regulating the content that went against its internal laws but to eliminate the videos considered problematic that, until that moment, had not been removed from the platform.

“Really [Flaherty’s] interested in what we’re seeing that is NOT coming down,” read an internal Google employee email.

A day later, another internal YouTube email said, “…there is a very high degree of interest now coming from the White House regarding vaccine misinfo/vaccine hesitancy and our work around borderline content.”

“Unfortunately, the role of tech in addressing vaccine hesitancy is about to come under a massive spotlight, particularly as the supply of the vaccine is soon to outpace demand,” the email added.

A week later, correspondence exposed how the Government Affairs team at Google, the company that owns YouTube, was very interested in having the YT Product team hold meetings with White House staff to continue working on content regulation and strengthen relationships on other policy fronts.

“…we believe having the opportunity for you both to share more background would be hugely beneficial as we seek to work closely with this administration on multiple policy fronts,” reads the email from the Google team.

The unpublished information provided by the Judiciary Committee was revealed just one year after the “Twitter Files” came out. The committee itself, in the middle of the year, had also exposed how Facebook changed its content regulation policies after pressure from the White House, a pattern that is replicated in these “YouTube Files.”