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YouTube will restore channels banned for COVID and election misinformation (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.ml
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YouTube announced it will restore thousands of channels that were previously banned for violating its COVID-19 and election integrity policies[^1]. This decision came in a 28-page letter from Alphabet to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan on September 23, 2025[^7].

The company acknowledged that Biden administration officials had pressured YouTube to remove content "that did not violate its policies," which Alphabet called "unacceptable and wrong"[^1][^7]. YouTube's current guidelines now permit a "wider range of content" regarding COVID-19 and elections[^1].

Notable figures who could return include Dan Bongino (now FBI Deputy Director), White House counterterrorism chief Sebastian Gorka, and others who were banned for discussing COVID-19 or election claims[^14]. The platform will offer terminated creators a process to rejoin if they were banned for violating policies that are no longer in effect[^7].

As part of this change, YouTube will also ban the use of official fact-checkers on its platform, instead launching a feature similar to X's "Community Notes" that allows users to provide context on videos[^7].

[^1]: Ars Technica - YouTube will restore channels banned for COVID and election misinformation

[^7]: Deseret News - YouTube restores accounts that were censored over COVID-19 and 2020 election claims

[^14]: Washington Examiner - YouTube content creators no longer banned over political speech

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[–] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

And on no-no words like r*pe. I wanna watch court cases to learn something but lawtube is getting fucked by these inconsistent restrictions. I get that kids shouldn't watch everything but banning words to force this is not working at all. See Roblox or the countless Minecraft YouTubers involved in 'bad things'.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    This one has really surprised me. I'm not sure when this became so widespread, I guess because of tiktok? I feel like almost every channel I watch the advertiser unfriendly words are censored or are substituted with unalived or something. Pretty unfortunate.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    And it's not even like it does anything. People who think it's important to talk about the topic regardless will just replace the word. Doesn't take a genius to understand that this does not remedy the heaviness of the topic in any way, so essentially it just makes it sound like explaining world war 2 in Mickey mouse language. It makes a joke out of the topic, that's what it does. YouTube is making a joke out of those topics.

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