YouTube is blocking President Trump’s paid political advertisements, but the video service won’t say which YouTube policies the ads violated.
YouTube has censored hundreds of the Republican president’s ads, CBS’ 60 Minutes reported on Sunday, news that is hardly surprising given revelations that surfaced over this summer.
As The New American reported in June, Google is reworking its algorithms to help defeat Trump in 2020.
CBS Reviewed Google’s “Transparency Report.”
The revelation about the censored Trump ads came in a longer interview with YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki.
“President Trump has been advertising a lot on YouTube lately,” 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl began. “Have you taken down any of President Trump’s ads at all?”
Replied Wojcicki, “There are ads … that were not approved to run on Google or YouTube…. They’re available in our transparency report.”
“Kind of,” Stahl continued, noting that Google does indeed archive censored ads.
We looked at President Trump’s ads. Over 300 videos were taken down, mostly over the summer. But the archive doesn’t detail what rules they violate. There’s no transparency in the transparency report. The ads typically did run for a few days before they were taken down. And Google got paid for them.
Then Stahl asked how Wojcicki and YouTube answer the charge from conservatives that the social-media behemoth — users watch a billion hours of video per day, Stahl reported — censors views from the Right.
There are lots of very successful conservatives, creators on YouTube. Our systems, our algorithms, they don’t have any concept of understanding what’s a Democrat, what’s a Republican. 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.
Stahl did not report whether YouTube kept the money it was paid for the ads.
“Training Algorithms”
Wojcicki’s claim that YouTube isn’t censoring Trump or conservatives doesn’t comport with revelations about its parent company, Google, from two employees. They revealed that the globe-straddling leftist corporation has it in for Trump in 2020.
“They have openly stated that they think 2016 was a mistake,” Google engineer Kevin Cernekee told Fox talker Tucker Carlson in August. “They thought Trump should have lost in 2016. They really want Trump to lose in 2020. That’s their agenda. They have very biased people running every level of the company. They have quite a bit of control over the political process. That’s something we should really worry about.”
Blocking Trump’s reelection is “a major threat,” he told Carlson.
Another Google employee told Project Veritas that Google is “taking sides” because of Trump’s victory, while an anonymous whistleblower told PV that Google is “training the AI now” to defeat Trump.
Top Google exec Jen Gennai seemed to confirm that revelation in a PV surreptitious recording.
“We all got screwed over in 2016, again it wasn’t just us, it was, the people got screwed over, the news media got screwed over, like, everybody got screwed over so we’re rapidly been like, what happened there and how do we prevent it from happening again,” Gennai said.
So “we’re also training our algorithms, like, if 2016 happened again, would we have, would the outcome be different?”
Gennai said she’s only concerned about fairness to accredited victim groups. “My definition of fairness and bias specifically talks about historically marginalized communities,” she said. “And that’s who I care about. Communities who are in power and have traditionally been in power are not who I’m solving fairness for.”
Fairness at Google, then, would not include Trump or his white voters.
Search Results
Aside from blocking Trump’s YouTube ads, Google also manipulates search results, the former employees said.
Example? A search for Donald Trump’s book Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America, would return Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, a bug that Google did not fix for nine months.
Another manipulation, the anonymous whistleblower told PV, involves Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal.
“Hillary Clinton’s emails” will not autocomplete in Google’s search window, although the e-mails were a highly searched subject.
The social-justice warriors inside Google think “Clinton’s emails [are] a conspiracy theory and it’s unfair to return results based on her emails,” the whistleblower told PV.
To its credit, YouTube did not remove President Trump’s ad detailing the Biden-Burisma influence-peddling scandal.
Facebook refused to remove the ad despite a request from the Biden campaign.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey banned all political ads from his platform on October 30 because he did not think “political reach” should be purchased.
Photo: AP Images
