YouTube is already signaling that any move away from censorship will be limited and far off. But even the hint that the enormous video program might back down was too much for this CBS guest.
Former Facebook Global Head of Elections Integrity Ops Yael Eisenstat cast doubt on whether conservatives had been censored on social media and condemned recent news that YouTube would allow the return of accounts suspended for wrongthink on COVID-19 or elections. During the Sept. 26 edition of “Daily Report,” Eistenstat claimed that YouTube’s changes were “[i]n direct response to Representative Jim Jordan having accused them over and over again of censoring conservative speech, something, which I just want to point out, has been proven over and over again by researchers and data to be untrue.”
Eisenstat incredibly followed this denial of censorship by hyperventilating about the horror of YouTube possibly allowing people censored on the platform to return. After connecting online speech for the Capitol riot, Eisenstat queried Google, “My question to Google, who is claiming they're going to start replatforming these people who broke their own rules around election denialism: Are they going to bring them back on? And if they start trying to organize and foment violence again, if they start spreading very dangerous rhetoric, is that just going to be okay now?”
Eisenstat is currently Director of Policy and Impact for Cybersecurity and Democracy, a multi-university research project. Her boss, Laura Edelson, a former chief technologist at the Biden-led Department of Justice, previously called for more censorship on CBS Mornings on Sept. 15.
Eisenstat’s comments came in response to a Sept. 23 letter from Google/YouTube parent company Alphabet’s outside counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, announcing YouTube would restore some censored accounts. The letter also acknowledged that Alphabet platforms had faced government pressure to censor, as Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg and X owner Elon Musk had already made clear.
However, just two days after Alphabet’s outside counsel wrote to Jordan, YouTube announced in a post on X that even the letter’s purported move away from censorship was a “limited pilot program,” which is "not yet open.” YouTube also wrote, “It’s still against our Community Guidelines for previously terminated users to use, possess or create other channels and we’ll terminate new channels from previously terminated users in accordance with these guidelines.”
In addition to slow-walking its announced censorship rollback, YouTube has been engaged in massive censorship of so-called misinformation. According to Google’s transparency report covering April 2025 to July 2025, YouTube removed 121,698 videos and took down 66,096 channels for so-called “misinformation.” This didn’t take place over the course of the Biden administration or the life of the internet, but over the most recently recorded four months of the second Trump administration.
On the same page that contains these heinous statistics, Google boasted about the speed at which YouTube censors speech, noting that only 1.17 percent of censored videos reach 10,000 views or greater before being deleted, and that an astonishing 48.77 percent of censored videos are effectively disappeared before a single person sees them.
Notably, Google has also released data on worldwide censorship requests. Prior to President Joe Biden taking office, Google fielded 203,901 censorship requests from 2011 until 2021, or 22,656 a year. From 2021 until 2025, governments requested Google censor content 322,104 times, or 80,526 times per year.
This may be because the Biden administration pushed 57 censorship initiatives across 90 government departments and their censorship efforts didn’t stop at America’s borders.
During Biden’s presidency, Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken pushed a number of foreign countries into a compact to censor speech on the internet (Censorship Initiative #1). According to Google, the Biden administration repeatedly ordered YouTube to take down content, including content labelled “hate speech,” “religious offense,” and astonishingly, “government criticism.”
Conservatives are under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
