Tina Nguyen is a senior reporter for The Verge, covering the Trump administration, Elon Musk’s takeover of the federal government, and the tech industry’s embrace of the MAGA movement.
Meta may have caved on their content moderation policies for the sake of “free speech”, but there’s a world of other Big Tech companies out there – and more social media platforms for conservatives to de-censor. On Thursday, Rep. Jim Jordan subpoenaed Alphabet, the parent company of Google, demanding documents that show whether YouTube removed content at the request of the Biden-Harris administration – acting, in his words, as “a direct participant in the federal government’s censorship regime.”
Although Republican party hardliners have long argued that Big Tech tilts algorithms and content moderation policies against their social media content, the overall right-wing momentum against Big Tech has further accelerated since 2021 after Donald Trump was removed from Twitter (now X) after January 6th. Jordan, who became chairman of the House Judiciary Committee in 2023, has wielded his platform and subpoena powers to dig into the databanks of Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Apple among others, believing that they singled out conservative social media accounts on the behest of the Biden administration’s Department of Justice and engaged in unlawful suppression of free speech.
So far, their attempts have notched one notable success: last May, the committee published a report claiming that Biden had repeatedly coerced Meta into removing content from their platforms. “Following this oversight, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, admitted that it was wrong to bow to the Biden-Harris Administration’s demands, publicly committed to restoring free speech on its platforms, and reformed its policies,” Jordan wrote in the letter accompanying the Alphabet subpoena. “Alphabet, to our knowledge, has not similarly disavowed the Biden-Harris Administration’s attempts to censor speech.”
”We’ll continue to show the committee how we enforce our policies independently, rooted in our commitment to free expression,” Google spokesperson Jose Castañeda told The Verge in response to a request for comment.