In a landmark letter written to the US Congress, Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, admitted it had been complicit in political censorship under pressure from the previous US administration and said that the European Union was forcing the same.
The tech giant warned that Brussels could force companies to remove lawful social-media content and could risk freedom of expression “within and outside of the EU”.
This could lead to further tensions with the current US administration, which is sensitive to the possibility of free speech rights of its citizens being violated.
Daniel F Donovan, the Counsel for Alphabet, wrote a letter to Jim Jordan, Chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary in the United States House of Representatives, in response to subpoenas by the Committee.
While the main focus was on the admission of exercising censorship on US citizens, especially Conservative ones, Alphabet went on to say that the EU was also putting pressure on the company to shut down certain voices.
In this exclusive Brussels Signal interview, three US Congressmen, @Jim_Jordan, @RepFitzgerald, and @RepKiley join us to discuss growing concerns over the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and its global implications for freedom of speech. pic.twitter.com/Yge4hpo8u8
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) July 29, 2025
It highlighted what it said was the negative role of the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in this regard.
“The Committee has taken important investigative steps to highlight that onerous obligations under laws such as the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act may stifle innovation and restrict access to information.
“These laws place a disproportionate regulatory burden on American companies, and the company has long expressed its concern about the risk that the DSA may pose to freedom of expression both within and outside the European Union, depending on how certain provisions may be enforced,” the letter stated.
“The DSA could be interpreted in such a way as to require Alphabet and other providers of intermediary services to remove lawful content, jeopardising the companies’ ability to develop and enforce global policies that support rights to free expression and access to information,” it continued.
“The DSA may open avenues for substantive regulation of lawful speech, including through risk mitigation, the use of codes of conduct and crisis protocols, and the out-of-court dispute settlement mechanism. Alphabet remains mindful of these risks and continues to be vigilant in its defence of these rights.”
Effectively, Google is warning that the DSA, in practice, forces it to limit or remove content that is actually legal, using approaches such as “safety protocols,” “risk assessments” and “crisis rules.” This could affect content worldwide.
That would mean people with legitimate concerns regarding certain sensitive subjects such as vaccines, climate change, election results or migration, could see their content removed or the reach of their posts blocked at the order of Brussels.
Brussels Signal repeatedly reached out to the European Commission for a comment but had not received a reply at the time of writing.
Government-imposed censorship was, in fact, as Alphabet admitted, the case in the US under the previous administration.
Alphabet addressed concerns about possible censorship it exerted on its users and admitted that the progressive Biden administration “conducted repeated and sustained outreach” to the company and “pressed it regarding certain user-generated contend related to the Covid-19 pandemic that did not violate its policies”.
Did Google just admit they rigged the 2020 elections?
What's the consequence for this?
The large channel bans for political speech and elections were in October 2020. https://t.co/FW2AnPN5o0
— Chris Pavlovski 🏴☠️ (@chrispavlovski) September 23, 2025
Online content contesting the policies regarding the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 US presidential election results has been taken offline and accounts posting it received bans. Now, Alphabet is admitting it went too far with this, although it put all the responsibility for it with the Biden administration, noting that the content did not violate its own policies.
So while they were respecting free speech, Biden officials “created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms based on their concerns regarding misinformation”, Alphabet claimed.
“It is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden administration, attempts to dictate how the company moderates content and the company has consistently fought against those efforts on First Amendment grounds,” Alphabet said.
The company said it acted with good intentions but that “it should never come at the expense of public debate on these important issues.”
Next to pulling down thousands of “harmful and misleading” videos and killing off more than 8,000 channels in YouTube, Google also censored Republican politicians, such as Senator Rand Paul, a ophthalmologist by education, who was talking about peer-reviewed studies that contested the efficacy of cloth masks against the spread of viruses.
Alphabet demonised popular Conservative media producers like Steven Crowder, Jordan Peterson, current Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino and current Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.
Even news websites such as The Federalist and ZeroHedge were demonised.
Alphabet has now apologised and said it offered “an opportunity to re-join the platform”.
In August last year, Meta’s owner Mark Zuckerberg had admitted his company was “pressured” by then-US president Joe Biden’s administration to censor certain content.
He said the pressure he felt was “wrong” and that he came to “regret” his company not being more outspoken. Meta has vowed to restore free speech.
In the 2020 US election cycle, the FBI pushed his company to demote reporting on “potential Russian disinformation” about Biden’s son Hunter, who was mired in scandals and corruption.
Earlier this year, Zuckerberg praised the US for what he said was the “strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world”. He contrasted that with the EU, where he claimed there was “an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalising censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there”.
Google has rejected demands by the European Commission to add fact-checking to its search results and YouTube videos as well as to use fact-checking in ranking and removing content. https://t.co/YiMHGSoyhE
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) January 17, 2025
