The growing role of big tech in influencing elections is no joke, and it’s putting the liberal media to shame.
We already know that Google, which controls over 90% of the search traffic in this country, *probably* altered search results during the 2016 election to make them more favorable to Hillary Clinton and less charitable to Donald Trump. It’s already no secret that the American media as a whole leans left, but to have the main outlet used to fact check them funneled feels almost criminal.
While Facebook has managed to convince users on both sides of the political spectrum that the website is against their ideology, the platform actually has been the most unbiased in how they’re handling election ads – that anything goes. It’s truly impossible to fact check all ads like critics want Facebook to do, especially in politics, where the truth is never black and white. Indeed, if any social media site were to set guidelines for acceptable political ads, they could simply inject their own bias through selective enforcement. That’s exactly what’s happening at YouTube (which is owned by Google/Alphabet) – as the company’s CEO Susan Wojcicki admitted during a recent appearance on 60 Minutes.
When 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl asked her “Have you taken down any of President Trump’s ads at all?” Wojcicki said, “There are ads of President Trump that were not approved to run on Google or YouTube.” When asked to give an example, Wojcicki added, “Well, they’re available in our transparency report.” Then she dropped this bombshell: that over 300 pro-Trump ads have been taken down by YouTube.
Watch below:
In a part of the interview not shown above, Wojcicki brushes off allegations of bias: “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.” It’s awfully convenient then that she could cite 300 cases of when these supposedly bias-free algorithms negatively impacted the Trump campaign, and a grand total of zero cases where any Democrat candidate ran into a similar problem. Even if she’s correct, certainly there’s a human to monitor what YouTube’s algorithms are flagging – or at least a human to monitor appeals after one’s ad is deemed unworthy.
Wojcicki would also boast that she’s cut the amount of “controversial content” people view on YouTube by 70% (whatever that means), and said that her parent company Google has over 10,000 people monitoring controversial content.
They’re trying to warp our reality, and unlike the liberal media, they don’t even pretend to hide it.
