Preparing For The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, Google Removed Over 300 Donald Trump Ads

03/12/2019

Internet tech companies have been updating their policies to anticipate the U.S. Presidential election in 2020.

Google is part of the crowd, hoping to better protect the democratic process, by trying to stop the spread of misinformation.

While the company tends to be neutral when dealing with political ads on its platform, including on YouTube, the internet giant is limiting political advertisers from targeting ads based on voters’ political leanings or public voter records.

In its announcement, Google and YouTube jointly removed more than 300 ads from President Donald Trump for "violating company policy."

First reported by 60 Minutes, which gets its stories from America's most prevalent issues, correspondent Lesley Stahl asked YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki if the video-streaming service had taken down any of Trump’s ads.

Wojcicki said that: “There are ads of President Trump that were not approved to run on Google or YouTube," and that "They’re available in our transparency report.”

"Can a politician lie on YouTube?" asked Stahl.

“For every single video, I think it’s really important to look at it,” Wojcicki said. “Politicians are always accusing their opponents of lying. That said, it’s not OK to have technically manipulated content that would be misleading.”

The internet is where everything in the real world happens digitally.

With social media networks connecting people with their massive reach, the once the tools to help people and support free speech and democracy have been increasingly used for spreading hate and misinformation.

As a result, many people were left with information that affect their morality.

And when considering politics, the sensitive subject frequently takes on the internet when elections are about to take place, no matter where in the world, resulting in amplification of political disinformation in elections.

With diminishing users' trust, social media is starting to tweak their policies to prevent hoaxes from spreading like they used to.

YouTube’s transparency report for political advertising in the U.S., which outlines incidents where ads have been removed from the platform for users in the region, has listed over the Trump-related ads that have been removed, despite not detailing what rules they specifically violated.

The report only shows that the Trump’s ads typically ran for just a few days before they were removed, and during this period, Google was paid for the hosting.