Jim Jordan Claims Google Censored Conservatives. His Own Committee’s Work Shows Otherwise.
Google execs’ interviews before the House Judiciary Committee show no evidence of “censorship” or government coercion - so who’s lying?
For the past three years, Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH) has used his position as Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee to harass researchers, government employees, and social media platform staffers while screeching about allegations of “conservative censorship.”1 Jordan has been a commanding officer in the MAGA movement’s war on reality; if you harass, sue, and demonize truth tellers enough, they might be frightened into silence. Without truth tellers holding them to account, autocrats can get away with much more.
Last week, Jordan got a new arrow in his quiver full of censorship lies in the form of a lily-livered letter from Google. He claimed it as evidence of liberal bias at the social media platforms and a victory for free speech, waving it around on Fox News and X and everywhere else that creatures like him lurk.
It’s a convenient prop at a convenient moment: since Charlie Kirk’s tragic assassination, conservatives have been resurfacing censorship allegations to rationalize the Trump Administration’s free-speech-limiting actions (which, for the record, are far worse than anything they ever imagined for the Biden Administration).
The only problem? The documents that Jim Jordan himself gathered in a sprawling, two-year investigation of his censorship lie contradict his claim. The Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government interviewed over 15 Google and YouTube executives who swore before Congress at least 98 times that no censorship happened, that they never felt the government pressured or coerced them to make content moderation decisions, and they did their jobs the same way no matter who was in the White House.
I read all 15 of the interviews that Chairman Jordan released so you don’t have to.
Somebody’s lying, and I don’t think it’s the tech workers who were dragged up to Capitol Hill as pawns in Jordan’s political fantasy.
The Letter
Before we get to what the Google managers said, let’s look at what their employer just did.
Alphabet—the parent company of Google and YouTube—had their lawyer send Jordan’s “Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government” a groveling missive detailing the company’s interactions with the Subcommittee so far. Much like Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to Jordan in August 2024, Google’s letter throws Jordan a bone. It presents a minimal mea culpa for what Jordan and MAGA world perceive as transgressions against conservatives (but are actually just the practice of responsible content moderation), thereby getting Jordan—and perhaps the rest of the federal government—off Alphabet’s back:
The reaction to this lily-livered letter has been predictable. As Mike Masnick of TechDirt writes:
Lots of very silly people (including Jordan) have been running around all week falsely claiming that Google has “admitted” that the Biden administration illegally censored people, and in response, they’re now reinstating accounts of people who were “unfairly censored.”
To be fair, this is what Google wants Jim Jordan and MAGA people to believe because it feeds into their pathetic victim narrative.
But it’s not what Google actually said for people who can read (and comprehend basic English).
I encourage you to read Masnick’s whole piece and the Google letter for yourself, but the main point is that Biden Administration conducted outreach about the platform’s COVID-19 policies (and the President himself sometimes spoke about pandemic misinformation on platforms); the letter affirms this outreach did not change the company’s content moderation practices. The lawyer goes on to affirm that YouTube has never used third-party fact-checkers and won’t in the future. He also makes an offering: creators who were terminated under the company’s now-defunct COVID-19 guidelines can have their accounts back.
Jordan celebrated, writing on X that “because of our work, YouTube is rolling back its censorship policies on political speech, including topics such as COVID and elections.” Translation: because Jordan and his Weaponization Subcommittee goons harassed YouTube about their content moderation decisions for over two years—the very same thing they accused the Biden Administration of doing—the company has changed how it moderates speech. Sounds an awful lot like the “weaponization of the federal government” to me.
The “Weaponization” Investigation
Jordan’s public celebration is rendered even more distasteful when you’re intimately familiar with what he’s been up to the past three years.
I had the distinct honor of being the first disinformation researcher to receive a subpoena from the Weaponization Subcommittee. Jordan—along with three other GOP Members (Gaetz, Issa, and Biggs. Aren’t I just the luckiest?), one Democrat (Ivey), and a gaggle of lawyers and staff—deposed me for five hours in April 2023, so I know a bit about what the Google and YouTube managers he targeted feel like. It’s not fun. You’re in the hot seat for the long haul, often explaining complex or even personal issues to people who are using you to make a political point. I have a hard time imagining someone—let alone more than 15 people across two years—lying to Congress during these interviews. It’s unlawful, would open up their companies and themselves to further legal pain, and frankly, would be almost impossible to achieve without somebody screwing up. Most of these people weren’t political operators; they were tech nerds who were clearly freaked out about what they’d been dragged into.
Jordan kept all of these interviews locked down for months (in some cases, over a year) on end. (The Democrats correctly called him out for keeping them secret.) He didn’t want the public to know that he hadn’t found the smoking gun: evidence of the Biden Administration’s “coercion” of the social media platforms to remove conservative content online, or really, any evidence of anti-conservative bias at all. What they do show is social media workers, government employees, and researchers doing their best to inform the public during fraught moments in American history.
He and his staff dropped nearly all of the transcripts in a 17,000-page report at the end of 2024. The PDF of the transcripts is unindexed and difficult to navigate, which I would wager is intentional. The GOP didn’t want anyone to read them, since they so clearly undermine the censorship lie, which has underpinned MAGA’s long list of grievances since 2020. I’m sure nobody (except maybe the committee staff) read them all. Until today.
What the Execs Said
I pulled out all the moments that stood out to me as directly contradicting the censorship lie in a 100-slide deck, for easy skimming. Importantly, there was not a single example across the 15 Google executives’ interviews that upheld Jordan’s claim that the Biden administration coerced the platform’s content moderation decisions around COVID or any other topics, nor did the interviews display any evidence of anti-conservative bias. (If they had, don’t you think Jordan would be incessantly crowing about it to this day?)
The Google and YouTube staff repeatedly affirmed that their interactions with federal government employees had no bearing on their content moderation decisions or their internal policymaking. Take this excerpt, from YouTube’s Director of Public Policy for the Americas, referencing Rob Flaherty, a White House Digital Director who became a point of fixation for Jordan and his staff:
They affirmed that their work remained consistent—and nonpartisan—across administrations. Here’s Google’s Head of Information Quality Strategy:
They also confirmed, over and over and over again, that they never felt coerced, threatened, or even, as Alphabet’s letter asserts, “pressed” by the Biden White House. Here’s a YouTube Public Policy Manager, who interfaced directly with White House officials.
Staff even rebuffed fairly anodyne requests from public health officials, according to Google’s Former Strategic Partner Development Manager:
Check out the slide deck; there are dozens more examples like these.
As I read through the transcripts, what stood out to me (other than the complete disregard for the truth that Jordan and other proponents of the censorship lie have shown over the past few years) was the enormous waste of taxpayer resources Jordan’s witch hunt has been. Most of these interviews spend hours establishing Google’s organizational chart: Who’s your boss? Who are your reports? Do you talk to the CEO? Did they all do censorship with you?
Frequently, they hauled in individuals who had nothing to do with content moderation, such as Google’s former AI Principles Operations & Governance Lead or YouTube’s Director of Health Partnerships. They clearly thought they had bagged a big fish with the latter—they had “health” in their title, and they were working at YouTube, so they assumed they were happily censoring every day—but it turned out this person’s job was almost entirely focused on helping surface authoritative information to users who were looking for it.
Evil, right? Moreover, all the information about this person’s role and team was available online:
The interview concluded after just two hours—the shortest interview I read. The committee clearly knew they screwed up.
Americans paid for Jordan and his committee staff to harass hundreds of people based on a complete fiction. Now he’s gallivanting around the country, asking us to forget that fact, using false allegations of “censorship” and “coercion” to excuse the vast assault on the First Amendment ongoing under Trump 2.0.
I won’t forget the five hours I spent with Jordan. I’m sure the Google executives won’t either. And as their company throws them and their work under the bus to curry political favor, the least we can do is read their testimony and hold Jordan to account.
Who's lying? Jim Jordan. Angrily, accusingly, sanctimoniously ... That's his schtick.
Biden administration asked companies to remove some dangerous lies. Before any of that Trump-1 pressured companies over stuff like Chrissy Teigen's "...bitch ass pussy .. mr president" tweet.