How does one of the world’s most powerful companies please powerful Republicans — without actually doing that much?
Mark Zuckerberg figured out that trick in the summer of 2024. That’s when he sent a letter to Congress that sort-of-but-not-really apologized for behavior conservatives have accused Big Tech platforms of for years — but also said the real bad actors were Joe Biden and his administration.
Now, we’re seeing Google use the same playbook, with one twist, which we’ll get to in a minute.
But the very big picture is that Google, like Meta in 2024, is attempting to give a win to Jim Jordan, the Republican Congressman who has long been trying to prove that Big Tech platforms are biased against conservatives. But it’s trying to do that without admitting that it did much wrong itself.
So, in a letter to Jordan, released on Tuesday, Google spends a lot of time explaining that it has always been committed to free expression, and other ideas that aren’t remotely controversial. It also doesn’t acknowledge that it made any mistakes when it dealt with controversial claims during the COVID-19 pandemic, or the claims Donald Trump and his supporters made about the 2020 election.
But Google’s letter, like Zuckerberg’s letter in 2024, does accuse the Biden administration of attempting to influence the way the company dealt with content on its platforms. Biden and his officials “created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms,” Google reports. (While we’re here, it’s worth noting that Zuckerberg’s letter was signed by Zuckerberg. The Google letter was signed by Dan Donovan, an attorney at King & Spalding who specializes in congressional investigations.)
If you’re jumping into this story without any history or context, Google’s statements might seem like a meaningful disclosure — that a giant tech platform says the last president tried to bend it to his will.
But the truth is that all of the Big Tech platforms actively and publicly sought input from the White House — during both the Trump 1.0 and Biden administrations — about the best way to handle claims about the virus. And all of them struggled to balance that guidance against what some of their users wanted to do.
How the platforms handled that debate — as well as one about the way to handle claims about the 2020 election results — is still an ongoing discussion.
But that’s not what Google is getting into here. It’s simply saying that it did its best, and that the Biden administration tried to sway it, and it makes no mention at all of what the Trump administration did.
Meaning that Google very consciously provided Jordan with a letter that would allow him to claim that Google says the Biden administration pushed it around for the last few years, even if that’s not really what it says.
Sure enough, that’s exactly how Jordan’s committee summarizes the Google letter. It notes that Google says “the Biden Administration pressured Google to censor Americans and remove content that did not violate YouTube’s policies,” and that “The Biden Administration censorship pressure was ‘unacceptable and wrong.'”
But, unlike Meta, Google did use the letter to announce an actual policy change: It is going to give YouTube users who were kicked off the platform for violating policies about COVID or the election “an opportunity” to come back.
A Google rep declined to explain how that opportunity would be administered, and whether it applies to everyone who’s ever been kicked off — or just people who were booted for violating COVID or election-related rules.
But it certainly suggests that high-profile conservatives like Dan Bongino — who was booted off YouTube in 2022, and is now the second-highest ranking official at the FBI — will be allowed back on the world’s biggest video platform.
The fact that Google booted a user four years ago, and is likely to reinstate him now, when he’s one of the most powerful men in government, is quite a story. It also nicely explains why Google and the other tech platforms are so uncomfortable with any kind of decision-making about the properties they own. Decisions that might have seemed OK in one political climate get reversed in a new one — so why make any calls at all?
Still, the YouTube news is less jarring when you look at the overall context: As the letter notes, YouTube and Google had already been removing restrictions about COVID and election speech in the last few years — before Trump was re-elected.
And as media reporter Oliver Darcy has noted, YouTube TV, the company’s pay TV offering, recently signed a deal with One America News Network — the same outlet YouTube had suspended during the pandemic (after Joe Biden’s 2020 election, but while Trump was still serving out his first term).
So this is the kind of concession that Google can offer Jordan, without making much of a concession at all: Your political opponents tried to pressure us, but we resisted. And we’re not saying we screwed up by kicking people off — but they can come back, anyway.
And that seems to be the way Big Tech is approaching government in general during Trump 2.0. You give the President and his allies something for public consumption — your presence at the inauguration, or a gold-and-glass bauble, a letter saying his predecessor acted badly — and you get to keep on doing business, more or less as normal.
Let’s see if that playbook keeps working.
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