How Google shifted from a bastion of accurate information to a steward of free expression

Google long touted the need 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 company’s YouTube division on Tuesday said it will soon allow accounts that were previously banned for spreading misinformation related to Covid-19 and the 2020 U.S. election to apply for reinstatement. The company 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 new stance comes despite the company touting the need for accuracy and fact-checking as far back as 2016 and throughout the pandemic. During that time, the company has used third party fact-checkers and trust and safety teams monitoring misinformation.

Donovan’s letter is the latest backtrack from the company that once positioned itself as a bastion for accurate information but is increasingly touting “free expression.” Google isn’t alone. Meta similarly changed its speech policies in January, just before the second inauguration of President Donald Trump.

YouTube’s new reinstatement policy comes as Alphabet is under heavy regulatory pressure. The company lost back-to-back antitrust cases brought by the Department of Justice related to Google’s dominance in online search and advertising. Google is also 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 company formerly known as Twitter and YouTube later in 2021, and he settled with Meta and X earlier this year. 

“Google is committed to free expression and works to connect users with a broad range of high quality, relevant information,” the company told CNBC in a statement, adding that it does not rely on external fact checkers for ranking content in products like Search or YouTube.

The company added that it is continue to invest in new technologies like SynthID, a watermarking tool that shows when content is AI-generated, and Community Notes, a feature that allows users to annotate content on YouTube with additional context.

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

“We’re excited to see the growth of the Fact Check community and to shine a light on its efforts to divine fact from fiction, wisdom from spin,” Google said at the time.

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 fact-checked tags in search results showed information about the accuracy of a claim, who made the claim and who fact checked the claim.

“Even though differing conclusions may be presented, we think it’s still helpful for people to understand the degree of consensus around a particular claim and have clear information on which sources agree,” the company said at 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 question, CNBC reported at the time.

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

Google’s fact-checking efforts took on greater importance following the Covid-19 outbreak. The company 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 would be “expanding fact checks on YouTube to the United States.” To do this, YouTube said it would use the information panels introduced in 2018 to link users to information about Covid-19 from sources like the World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and local health authorities.

“The outbreak of COVID-19 and its spread around the world has reaffirmed how important it is for viewers to get accurate information during fast-moving events,” it said at 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 around the clock and across the globe to safeguard our users from phishing, conspiracy theories, malware and misinformation, and we are constantly on the lookout for new threats,” Pichai wrote. “On YouTube, we are working to quickly remove any content that claims to prevent the coronavirus in place of seeking 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 four more years in the office last night.” The video also included unsubstantiated claims of “rampant voter fraud” against Republican ballots and urged viewers to “take action” against Democrats. The video had more than 300,000 views before YouTube stopped running ads alongside it.

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

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

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

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

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

YouTube said in a blog that it made the decision to balance its twin goals of “protecting our community and providing a home for open discussion and debate.” The decision, which came 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 current environment, we find that while removing this content does curb some misinformation, it could also have the unintended effect of curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm,” the company wrote.

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

A year later, Google and YouTube in March 2024 laid off employees from its trust and safety team as part of broader staff cuts across the company. Those cuts came as others in tech, including Meta, Amazon and the company then known as Twitter, also reduced the size of their respective trust and safety teams.

The velocity 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 would “pull out of all fact-checking commitments” from its software code before letting its services become a code of conduct for the EU’s Digital Services Act, according to a January report by Axios.

The fact-checking integration required by the European Commission “simply isn’t appropriate or effective for our services,” Walker wrote in a letter to the deputy director, according to the report.

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

“Google did not inform fact-checkers that the 10-year collaboration was coming to an end, let alone consult with us on the decision to stop using the fact-checks that we provided for free,” 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 company added that the phase out of ClaimReview was done as part of an effort to simplify its Search results page.

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

And with Tuesday’s letter, YouTube said it would allow accounts previously banned for spreading misinformation about Covid-19 and the 2020 U.S. election to apply for reinstatement. Among channels previously banned under those rules were some associated with 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 new channels. It clarified that the new policy is a “limited pilot program” that hasn’t formally opened yet.

“YouTube has not and will not empower fact-checkers to take action 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 is funded by a government, or publicly funded, an information panel providing publisher context may be displayed on the watch page of the videos on its channel,” the help page states.

Google said it will continue to use information panels on topics that warrant additional context, such as videos that discuss the moon landing. Google said the panels link to more information but never refute claims made within a particular video.

In the letter, Alphabet’s Donovan also wrote that senior Biden administration officials pressed the company 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 is unacceptable and wrong 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 during the pandemic was well intentioned, it “should never have come at the expense of public debate.”

In that five-page letter, Alphabet appeared to take a different tone than it had in the past. There were no mentions of accurate, factual or highly-reliable information, but the company made several mentions of protecting “free expression.”

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