300+ Trump ads taken down by Google, YouTube
300+ Trump ads taken down by Google, YouTube
60
Minutes finds over 300 video ads for President Trump were taken down, mostly
over the summer, for violating company policy
How to handle political ads on social
media has become a growing concern as the 2020 U.S. presidential election
approaches.
Facebook has taken most of the heat,
after refusing to remove an ad for President Trump's reelection featuring false
information about his opponent Joe Biden.
While political ads on social media do
not adhere to different rules than political ads on TV, they have come under
specific scrutiny because of their unique ability to disseminate – broadly and
rapidly -- bad information, and the platforms' inability to properly police
them.
Compared to TV, online ads can spread
lies at an alarming rate -- bolstered by machine-learning algorithms that can
identify target audiences at enormous speed and scale.
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.
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.
"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 archive does detail how many days the
ad ran on the platform before it was taken down, approximately how much Google
was paid and how many impressions it received. Typically, ads ran a few days
before being yanked, suggesting they reached the target audience before
removal.
© 2019 CBS
Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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