In a letter sent to congress, a lawyer for YouTube says they will now allow users whose accounts were terminated due to misinformation policies to be reinstated.
It states that:
Senior Biden Administration officials, including White House
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
This reads like a very damning statement from Google that they were pressured above and beyond their own policies to limit speech from the executive branch of the US government. We should investigate the motivations behind the Biden Administration’s
actions at some point before it is lost to time.
While the Biden Administration should be held to account for their violations, this is further evidence that everyone should have their own website. Having your own channel that is harder to limit, and owning the connection to your audience is important in this age of algorithmic content, ai influencers, and whatever their agendas are.
The Company states they now have a commitment to freedom of expression
and will not bend to political pressure, though it’s hard to see how they
would not be open to doing this again with enough pressure from government
officials that can hold new proposed laws or favored contracts as incentives to
follow some other future government information war.
Without your own website your are at the whim of a some other tech firm’s policies or worse, a government going out of control.