Google, YouTube remove more than 300 Trump ads

President Donald Trump (White House photo)

Google and YouTube removed more than 300 Trump campaign ads, claiming they violated the companies' policies, according to "60 Minutes."

The campaign videos, which mostly ran during the summer, were removed within only a few days, Townhall reported.

The CBS News program asked YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki to respond to critics who say YouTube discriminates against conservative viewpoints.

"Well, first of all, there are lots of very successful conservative creators on YouTube," she said. "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."

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She said YouTube hears "this criticism from all sides."

"We also have people who come from more liberal backgrounds who complain about discrimination," Wojcicki said. "And so I think that no matter who you are, we are trying to enforce our policies in a consistent way for everybody."

Townhall noted YouTube had trouble explaining why it demonetized conservative commentator and comedian Steven Crowder last summer. YouTube, among many others, also has removed videos posted by investigative journalist James O'Keefe's Project Veritas and by Dennis Prager's PragerU.

In October, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced his platform will not run political advertisements.

Whistleblower

WND reported in August a former Google engineer, Zach Vorhies, claimed the company creates algorithms to hide its political bias.

Now a whistleblower, Vorhies delivered about 950 pages of documents to the Department of Justice's antitrust division, saying they would provide proof that Google has been manipulating its algorithms.

Project Veritas released a video interview with Vorhies in which explained he came forward because he "saw something dark and nefarious going on with the company and I realized that they were going to not only tamper with the elections, but use that tampering with the elections to essentially overthrow the United States."

The documents provided by Vorhies included a "news black list site for Google Now" that Vorhies alleges is a "blacklist" that restricts certain websites from appearing on news feeds for some Android Google products.

The list includes the conservative news site Newsbusters as well as the left-leaning site Media Matters. The document states that some sites are on the list because of a "high user block rate."

In a House Judiciary Committee hearing last December, Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified that the search engine was not biased against conservatives.

Pichai told lawmakers the search results are driven by "things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it."

He insisted the process is so intricate that the artificial intelligence could not be manipulated.

'What totalitarian states can do'

Vorhies, in an interview with investigative reporter Sara Carter in April, said he believes "a free market can fix" the problem with Google.

"The issue is that the free market has been distorted and what's happened is that the distortion is so grotesque and the engineering is so repulsive, all we need to do is just expose what's going on," he said. "People can hear that it is bad, but that can be bias. But when they see what Google has actually written with the documents, this will actually be taught in universities of what totalitarian states can do with this type of capability."

He told Carter he's asked himself many times if he's overreacting "and every time I simply look back at the documents and realize that I am not."

"It's that bad," he said. "Disclosing Google’s own words to the American public is something I am, must do, if I am to consider myself a good person. The world that google is building is not a place I, or you or our children want to live in."

In August, the chairman of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said a breakup of the tech giants could be the right remedy.

Chairman Joe Simons told Bloomberg he is leading a broad review of the technology sector to see whether companies, including Google and Facebook, are harming competition.

"If you have to, you do it," Simons said, according to Reuters. "It's not ideal because it's very messy. But if you have to you have to."

Reuters noted that Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a leading 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful, has vowed to break up Amazon, Google and Facebook, if elected, to promote competition.

The censorship and privacy violations of Google and its tech counterparts have been documented by current employees as well as internal documents and recordings.

CNBC reported in August a newly obtained internal email discussion showed Google employees were concerned about the tech giant's threat to free speech and its moderation of content three years before the issue entered political discourse.

As WND reported, the previous week, Google software engineer Greg Coppola was placed on administrative leave hours after he accused the company of political bias in an interview with Project Veritas.

In 2017, Google fired engineer James Damore for circulating an internal memo titled "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber." And engineer Mike Wacker was fired earlier this year after speaking out about the company’s "outrage mobs."