The Lacuna Project

lacuna (n.) a gap in a record where something should be

Independent research. Not affiliated with any government, agency, or company.

Company

YouTube (Alphabet Inc.)

Findings that rest on exhibits naming this entity

  • POL-3.10: Two peer-reviewed studies of YouTube found little evidence that its recommendation algorithm drove attention to radical content, and found that exposure to alternative and extremist channels came through subscriptions and external links among users who already held high levels of resentment.
  • INF-4.3: CISA's head of its misinformation team testified that CISA forwarded election officials' reports about posts to platforms in the 2020 election, and the record differs on whether it did so in 2022. The district court wrote in 2023 that no evidence produced in the case tied the Trump administration to the switchboarding, and a 2025 Senate Commerce majority report dates DHS's election-disinformation task force to March 2018.
  • INF-4.5: Meta (26 August 2024) and Alphabet (23 September 2025) each wrote to the House Judiciary Committee that senior Biden administration officials pressed them in 2021 over COVID-19 content, and each wrote that the company made its own decisions on removal and enforcement.
  • INF-4.6: Google's U.S. table lists 717 court and government requests naming 6,991 items in 2021, mostly for defamation, trademark and privacy, with no misinformation category. Meta's report excludes government reports handled under its Community Standards and lists 3 U.S. items for the first half of 2021 and 21 for the second, and X's report for January to June 2024 has no separate U.S. line in its removal table.
  • INF-4.7: No public dataset states how many government reports to platforms from 2017 to 2024 led to removal, by agency, platform and administration. The only figure in the record is the FBI agent's recollection of about half.
  • INF-4.8: Texas and Florida enacted laws in 2021 limiting platforms' removal decisions. In Moody v. NetChoice (1 July 2024) the Supreme Court vacated both judgments on facial-challenge grounds and wrote that a state may not interfere with private actors' speech to advance its own vision of ideological balance.
  • INF-4.10: On 12 August 2024 Commissioner Breton wrote to X's owner that the European Commission would not hesitate to make full use of its toolbox, including interim measures, and on 18 February 2025 the Commission wrote that the Digital Services Act does not regulate speech. The Commission's first non-compliance decision under the Act, against X on 5 December 2025, fined X 120 million euros for blue-checkmark design, its advertising repository and researcher data access, and did not concern the removal of any post.
  • INF-4.12: Executive Order 13925 (Trump, 28 May 2020) was revoked by Executive Order 14029 (Biden, 14 May 2021). Executive Order 14149 (Trump, 20 January 2025) directs that no federal officer, employee or agent engage in or facilitate conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.

Exhibits naming this entity

  • Exhibit 730 2 August 2021. Hosseinmardi, Ghasemian, Clauset, Mobius, Rothschild, Watts (PNAS): Examining the consumption of radical content on YouTube
  • Exhibit 731 September 2023. Chen, Nyhan, Reifler, Robertson, Wilson (Science Advances): Subscriptions and external links help drive resentful users to alternative and extremist YouTube channels
  • Exhibit 1124 1 July 2024. Supreme Court of the United States (Justice Kagan for the Court): Moody v. NetChoice, LLC, 603 U.S. 707 (2024) (Nos. 22-277 and 22-555)
  • Exhibit 1132 26 June 2023. House Committee on the Judiciary and Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government (majority staff): The Weaponization of CISA: How a "Cybersecurity" Agency Colluded with Big Tech and "Disinformation" Partners to Censor Americans (interim staff report)
  • Exhibit 1133 1 May 2024. House Committee on the Judiciary and Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government (majority staff): The Censorship-Industrial Complex: How Top Biden White House Officials Coerced Big Tech to Censor Americans, True Information, and Critics of the Biden Administration (interim staff report)
  • Exhibit 1134 25 July 2025. House Committee on the Judiciary (majority staff): The Foreign Censorship Threat: How the European Union's Digital Services Act Compels Global Censorship and Infringes on American Free Speech (interim staff report, with appendix of exhibits)
  • Exhibit 1139 23 September 2025. Alphabet Inc. and YouTube (through counsel): Letter from Daniel F. Donovan (King & Spalding, counsel for Alphabet Inc. and YouTube) to Chairman Jim Jordan, House Committee on the Judiciary
  • Exhibit 1140 30 October 2025. House Committee on the Judiciary, Democratic staff (Ranking Member Jamie Raskin): Letter from Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (House Judiciary Committee Democrats) to YouTube CEO Neal Mohan
  • Exhibit 1147 29 September 2021. YouTube (Alphabet Inc.): Managing harmful vaccine content on YouTube (YouTube Official Blog)
  • Exhibit 1148 Data through 31 December 2025; accessed 10 November 2026. Google LLC (Alphabet Inc.): Government requests to remove content (Google Transparency Report), data download of 1 July to 31 December 2025 edition
  • Exhibit 1157 28 May 2020 (published 2 June 2020). President Donald J. Trump: Executive Order 13925, Preventing Online Censorship (85 Fed. Reg. 34079)