More than 300 ads from President Trump’s re-election campaign were removed by YouTube and Google over the summer for “violating company policy,” according to a new report.
The video ads paid for by Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump for President, Inc., ran for several days on YouTube before being taken down, an investigation by “60 Minutes” found Sunday.
When quizzed on why the ads were pulled, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said some of videos were “not approved to run,” before deferring any further questions to Google’s online transparency report, which keeps an archive of political ads.
But the report gives no specific reason why the ads were taken down or what company policy they violated.
“There’s no transparency in the transparency report,” said 60 Minutes anchor correspondent Lesley Stahl.
Wojcicki denied the decision was motivated by political bias.
“Well, first of all there are lots of very successful conservative creators on YouTube,” she said Sunday. “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,” she added.
The interview comes as internet giants such as Facebook face scrutiny over their handling of political ads ahead of the 2020 election.
On Monday, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg defended the decision to allow fake political ads to remain on the website — telling “CBS This Morning” his company wasn’t in the censorship business.
“What I believe is that in a democracy, it’s really important that people can see for themselves what politicians are saying, so they can make their own judgments. And, you know, I don’t think that a private company should be censoring politicians or news,” Zuckerberg said Monday