Google, YouTube Removed Hundreds Of Ads For Trump 2020, Report

We found very little transparency in the transparency report 

By Carmine Sabia

As the Democrats insist that they want free and fair elections, and claim they want to stop election interference, they should set their sights on Silicon Valley.

A report by the news program “60 Minutes” showed hundreds of advertisements for President Donald Trump had been removed by Alphabet owned Google and YouTube in recent months.

“Have you taken down any of President Trump’s ads at all?” 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl said to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki in an interview.

“There are ads of President Trump that were not approved to run on Google or YouTube.” The CEO responded.

And when Stahl asked her for specific examples of such removals she said “Well, they’re available in our transparency report.”

60 Minutes reviewed the archive to learn more about President Trump’s problematic political ads. We found that over 300 video ads were taken down by Google and YouTube, mostly over the summer, for violating company policy.

But the archive doesn’t detail what policy was violated. Was it copyright violation? A lie or extreme inaccuracy? Faulty grammar? Bad punctuation? It’s unclear.

The ads determined to be offending are not available to be screened. We found very little transparency in the transparency report. 

“Facebook is facing a lot of controversy because it refuses to take down a President Trump ad about Biden which is not true. Would you run that ad?” Stahl said.

“So that is an ad that right now would not be a violation of our policies,” Wojcicki said.

“Is it on YouTube right now?” Stahl replied.

“It has been on YouTube,” Wojcicki responded.

“Can a politician lie on YouTube?” Stahl said.

“For every single video, I think it’s really important to look at it,” Wojcicki said. “Politicians are always accusing their opponents of lying. That said, it’s not OK to have technically manipulated content that would be misleading.”

“For example, there was a video uploaded of Nancy Pelosi,” she said of a doctored video of Speaker Pelosi from the Summer.

“It was slowed down just enough that it was unclear whether or not she was in her full capacity because she was speaking in a slower voice.”

“The title of the video actually said drunk, had that in the title. And we removed that video,” she said.

“As you know, conservatives think that you discriminate against them,” Stahl said to the YouTube CEO.

“Well, first of all there are lots of very successful conservative creators on YouTube… Our systems, our algorithms, they don’t have any concept of understanding what’s a Democrat, what’s a Republican,” she said.

“They don’t have any concept of political bias built into them in any way. And we do hear this criticism from all sides.

“We also have people who come from more liberal backgrounds who complain about discrimination,” the CEO said.

“And so I think that no matter who you are, we are trying to enforce our policies in a consistent way for everybody,” she said.

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(TLB) published this article/video report from The Federalist Papers with our appreciation for the coverage and availability for our readers. 

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