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Google-owned YouTube on Tuesday said it would immediately allow previously banned accounts to apply for reinstatement and roll back policies that treated violations as permanent.
This change will apply to deleted channels to post Covid-19 or election-related misinformation, according to a letter from alphabet Attorney Daniel Donovan is Attorney General Jim Jordan and R. Ohio. Previously, these types of crimes were subject to lifetime bans.
“Today, YouTube’s community guidelines allow for a wide range of content on Covid and election integrity,” writes Donovan.
YouTube writes that it will be open to a limited number of pilot projects open to a subset of creators and channels that have been terminated based on the company’s retirement policy. YouTube also said a new reinstatement program will soon be launched.
Among the channels previously banned under these rules were those associated with deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. It is not yet clear whether these channels will be revived.
The move follows the rise of Republican pressure on high-tech companies to reverse Biden’s era speech policy on vaccines and political misinformation. In March, Rep. Jordan summoned Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, claiming that YouTube was “in direct participation in the federal government’s censorship system.”
In 2021, YouTube said it would remove content that spreads misinformation about all approved vaccines.
Donovan wrote that amid the pandemic, senior Biden administration officials have urged the company to remove certain COVID-related videos that do not technically violate YouTube policies.
In the letter, Donovan said the pressure was “unacceptable” wrong.
According to Donovan’s letter, YouTube ended its standalone co-bid misinformation rules in December 2024.
YouTube doesn’t empower “third-party fact checkers” to moderate content, and continues to enable “free representations” on the platform, Donovan writes. Donovan writes that YouTube doesn’t use fact checkers, but the platform has created a program aimed at labeling the context of the video.
Similarly, Meta said in January that it had eliminated fact-checking programs on Facebook and Instagram.
YouTube has the ability to display an information panel with links to independent fact checks under the video. This feature provides more context for videos across YouTube with information from third-party sources.
In 2017, Google launched a fact-checking tool that displays labels in search and news results.
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