A report from 2020 last night revealed that Google has taken down some 300+ Trump ads supporting his reelection this year, without explanation, and Ted Cruz says it’s exactly why conservatives don’t trust Big Tech:
300+ ads supporting Trump’s reelection were taken down by @Google & @YouTube for violating company policy–yet no one knows what policies the ads violated. Lack of transparency & bias against conservatives is why the American people don't trust #BigTech.https://t.co/QDVYnWwHO0
— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) December 2, 2019
Here’s more from the report:
In October, responding to a groundswell of concern, Twitter announced it would ban political advertising on its platform. Google and its subsidiary YouTube do not ban these ads, but the company last month came out with adjustments and clarifications to its policy, including limiting microtargeting of users.
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.
“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.”
I have little doubt this is Google’s way of trying to tip the scales in favor of whichever socialist Democrat wins the election. They claim they are being fair and not targeting Trump or conservatives, but then the New York Times often claims they are reporting the news fairly, when we all know that just isn’t true at all.
No, we’ve seen enough to know that Big Tech is going to work overtime to try and defeat Trump next year. I suspect that before it’s over, there will be even more blatant censorship than what we’ve seen already.