In a comprehensive study, CBS News’s “60 Minutes” found that more than 300 video ads for President Trump were taken down by Google and YouTube for supposed violating company policy.
Looking through advertising archives, the newsmagazine found video advertisements were pulled primarily during the summer.
“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,” CBS wrote.
60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl asked Wojcicki, “Have you taken down any of President Trump’s ads at all?” YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki responded, “There are ads of President Trump that were not approved to run on Google or YouTube.” She added, “they’re available in our transparency report.”
“As you know, conservatives think that you discriminate against them,” Stahl tells YouTube’s Wojcicki, who replies: “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. 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. And so I think that no matter who you are, we are trying to enforce our policies in a consistent way for everybody.”
The newsmagazine said that after concerns were raised after the 2016 election cycle, Google and YouTube joined Facebook in compiling a searchable archive of political ads that have run on the site.
In an interview, Stahl asked Wojcicki, “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?”
“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 asked.
“It has been on YouTube,” the YouTube CEO said.
“Can a politician lie on YouTube?” Stahl asked.
“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.”
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