The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has been investigating whether Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube violated consumer protection laws when it suspended the accounts of users, according to people familiar with the probe.

The antitrust and consumer protection agency has been probing YouTube since last year and is in the final stages of preparing a potential lawsuit, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing a confidential probe.

The inquiry is looking at whether YouTube violated its own user policies when it banned or demoted content, said the people. The investigation is scrutinizing whether users may have been deceived by the company’s content policies into signing up for the service by believing they were allowed to post certain content, only to later have it taken down or have their accounts suspended, according to the people.

It’s unclear which accounts the agency’s investigation has covered. The company hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing and investigations may end without any enforcement action.

YouTube and other social media platforms banned the accounts of Donald Trump and other political figures in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol. Trump’s account was reinstated in 2023. YouTube also removed health-related content over vaccines and Covid-19 it deemed violated its misinformation policies.

If a lawsuit is filed, the company could either reach a settlement with the FTC to resolve the case or defend itself in court. A settlement would require sign-off by the FTC’s two Republican commissioners, Chair Andrew Ferguson and Commissioner Mark Meador.

YouTube declined to comment. FTC spokesman Joe Simonson declined to comment on the investigation or potential complaint.

The FTC’s Simonson said that “leaks will never stop or slow a single law-enforcement investigation or litigation at the FTC” and would be referred to authorities for investigation.

In public comments earlier this month, Ferguson focused on holding companies responsible for how they police speech, saying that the FTC’s consumer protection laws are “no different for a company that is selling widgets than it is for a company that sells access to speech online.”

“Whatever your policies are, you have to follow them. You can’t present one form of policy to consumers when they’re deciding whether to use your platform and then have a completely different one in practice,” Ferguson said at a public appearance in Aspen, Colorado. “We are going to examine to make sure that companies that make representations about their speech policies online are living up to them,” he said, without naming specific companies.

The investigation has been conducted by lawyers in the agency’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, the people said. The effort has been led by bureau director Chris Mufarrige. Some career staff have privately expressed disagreement with filing the case, according to people who asked not to be identified discussing internal dynamics.

Ferguson has been telegraphing his interest in a case on the issue since the end of the Biden Administration, when he was a minority Republican commissioner. The agency has no Democratic commissioners, after Trump removed both last year.

At that point he argued in favor of investigating the social media platforms for violating their content policies and potentially colluding to censor certain political speech. The biggest platforms “banned dissent on the origins of COVID-19, mask mandates, the efficacy and safety of COVID-19 vaccines, transgenderism, and the integrity of the 2020 election,” Ferguson wrote at the time. “Every major speech platform — Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube — banned President Trump roughly contemporaneously in early 2021.”

Within a few months after Ferguson became chair in January 2025, the agency sought public input and received more than 3,000 comments amid concerns that social media platforms ban or demonetize posts based on user affiliations or content.

The FTC’s February 2025 public comment request also suggested the agency could allege that social media platforms violated consumer protection law through unfair or deceptive terms of service that failed to inform users about suspension rules and appeal rights.

There’s little precedent for applying consumer protection and antitrust laws against online platforms for removing certain accounts or posts. Courts have given social media companies broad leeway to remove user content as they see fit, often likening the platform’s role to that of a newspaper exercising editorial judgments. The Supreme Court left that law, called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, intact in a 2023 decision.

Yet the high court ruling didn’t clarify how far that shield extends, and more recent cases have declined to exempt social media platforms from lawsuits on product liability and negligence allegations. Earlier this year, a Los Angeles jury found Meta Platforms Inc. and Google negligent in the design and operation of their platforms, building their websites to hook kids. A coalition of states reached a mid-trial settlement with Meta this week for as much as $18 billion to resolve allegations the company knowingly designed features that encouraged compulsive and prolonged use of its platforms by young people.

The consumer protection case is one of several pending at the agency involving the company. The FTC has been probing Google over its search advertising practices, Bloomberg previously reported. Last year, the FTC also said it was probing several artificial intelligence companies, including YouTube parent Alphabet, over AI chatbots aimed at teens and children. YouTube previously settled an FTC case in 2019 over allegations the company collected children’s information without parental consent in violation of online child safety laws.

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