YouTube says it’ll bring back creators banned for violating its COVID-19 and election content policies

• YouTube is set to reinstate channels previously banned for flouting its COVID-19 policies.
• That could mean the return of prominent conservative creators like Dan Bongino and Steve Bannon.
• The change comes in the wake of a House Judiciary investigation into Big Tech.

A roster of high-profile conservative voices could soon return to YouTube.

YouTube’s parent company, Alphabet, said in a letter published Tuesday that it intends to “provide an opportunity for all creators to rejoin the platform” whose accounts had been terminated over repeated violations of its COVID-19 and election integrity policies.

The letter, written by Alphabet lawyer Daniel Donovan to Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, said that YouTube “values conservative voices on its platform” and recognized their reach and role in civic discourse. (Read the letter in full below.)

The House Judiciary Committee published the letter on its website on Tuesday following its monthslong investigation into whether Biden White House officials pressured Big Tech platforms into censoring content. A Google spokesperson confirmed the authenticity of the letter.

YouTube’s about-face on previously banned accounts marks the latest shift in Big Tech content moderation. Companies from Meta to X have overhauled their content policies and switched away from using third-party fact-checkers.

Prominent YouTube channels from conservative creators — including Dan Bongino, Steve Bannon, and Children’s Health Defense, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nonprofit activist group, as well as those from lesser-known creators — had been banned from YouTube for flouting its COVID-19 misinformation and election-related policies. Bongino has since become the deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, while Kennedy leads the Department of Health and Human Services.

Google’s lawyer said in the letter published Tuesday that YouTube had ended all of its stand-alone, COVID-19-related policies by December 2024 and retired a separate policy regarding election integrity in 2023 to “allow for discussion of possible widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurring in the 2020 and other past U.S. Presidential elections.”

The letter didn’t go into detail about how previously banned creators could resume their terminated channels or whether their content would be monetized and therefore eligible to get a cut of ad revenue. The Google spokesperson had no further comment but added the company would have more to say in the coming weeks.

“This is another victory in the fight against censorship,” Jordan wrote in a post on X.

Google’s move to reinstate previously banned channels comes just over a year after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said — also in a letter to Jordan — that the Biden administration had repeatedly pressured Meta in 2021 to remove content related to COVID-19.

“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg wrote in the August 2024 letter.

Google, too, said senior Biden administration officials, including White House officials, had pressed the company to remove content related to the COVID-19 pandemic that didn’t violate YouTube’s policies.

“It is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden Administration, attempts to dictate how” a company moderates content, Google wrote in the letter published Tuesday.

Google said it has been testing a feature similar to X’s Community Notes to allow people to provide relevant context about its videos, but it “has not and will not empower fact-checkers to take action on or label content” on the platform.

Letter from Google counsel to House Judiciary Committee:

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