YouTube Removes Over 300 Trump Ads Without Giving Ample Reason Why

AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File
AP featured image
FILE – This March 20, 2018 file photo shows the YouTube app on an iPad in Baltimore. YouTube is updating its hate speech policies to prohibit videos with white supremacist and neo-Nazi content. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)
Advertisement

It would appear YouTube’s not going to stop at removing videos that give medical and scientific knowledge on the Wuhan virus that defies WHO narratives. It’s now taking down President Donald Trump’s ads without getting specific about what community guidelines they broke.

According to CBS News, YouTube has taken down over 300 of Trump’s 2020 campaign ads, saying that the reason was they broke its site rules. However, the social media site owned by Google is staying pretty nebulous in terms of what rules Trump’s campaign videos broke in particular:

In an interview on 60 Minutes, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said the controversial Trump/Biden ad does not violate their policy.

60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl asked Wojcicki, “Have you taken down any of President Trump’s ads at all?” YouTube’s CEO responded, “There are ads of President Trump that were not approved to run on Google or YouTube.” When pressed for an example, Wojcicki added, “Well, they’re available in our transparency report.”

In response to concerns raised after the 2016 election cycle, Google and YouTube, like Facebook, keep a searchable archive of political ads that have run on the site.

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.

Advertisement

Wojcicki swears up to YouTube’s algorithm being politically unbiased, yet this doesn’t explain the deletion of Trump’s campaign ads:

“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.”

It’s odd that we continue to see unclear reasoning for Silicon Valley’s actions against conservatives, and while Wojcicki, like other tech giant CEOs, has declared that they’re impartial, it’s clear that their own bias flies right over their heads.

As I wrote a while ago, Twitter’s brass doesn’t even recognize their own bias when it’s shoved into their faces. The idea that they could be ignorant to their own censorship efforts could be guided by an ideological standpoint they go by seems to be an alien concept.

Advertisement

(READ: Why Silicon Valley Tech Giants May Truly Believe They’re Not Being Biased When They Clearly Are)

Rest assured, the bias is there, and it is unfair. This is plain as day. One big clue is that over 300 of Trump’s campaign ads disappeared and they can’t exactly explain what rules they broke that justify it.

Recommended

Join the conversation as a VIP Member

Trending on RedState Videos