Wednesday, 4 December 2019

YouTube CEO admits hundreds of Trump ads were taken down, but still denies the site is biased

The CEO of YouTube admitted that hundreds of ads for President Donald Trump were taken down from the popular video media website, and claimed that this was done without political bias.
Susan Wojcicki made the comments in an interview with Lesley Stahl on "Sixty Minutes."
"President Trump has been advertising a lot on YouTube lately," said Stahl. "Have you taken down any of President Trump's ads at all?"
"There are ads of President Trump that were not approved to run on Google or YouTube," Wojcicki asserted.
Stahl pressed for examples of ads that were taken down and Wojcicki said they were available in a transparency report. Stahl noted that the report did not document what rules led to ads being taken down, and that Google still received ad revenue from those ads.
They counted over three hundred ads that were documented in the transparency report to be taken down from YouTube.
Stahl then pressed Wojcicki about accusations from conservatives that the website discriminated against them.
"Well, first of all there are lots of very successful conservative creators on YouTube," responded Wojcicki.
"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," the CEO added.
"And we do hear this criticism from all sides. We also have people who come from more liberal backgrounds who complain about discrimination," she continued. "And so I think that no matter who you are, we are trying to enforce our policies in a consistent way for everybody."

Here's the video of her comments: 

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