The CEOs of Facebook and YouTube are addressing scrutiny over political ads. Back in October, Twitter announced they would no longer accept political ads. But YouTube, Google, and Facebook continue to run the ads, including many that spread lies. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki addressed this on 60 Minutes (watch above). The program “found that over 300 (Trump) video ads were taken down by Google and YouTube, mostly over the summer, for violating company policy.” But the video doesn’t usually come down instantly. 60 Minutes writes, “Typically, ads ran a few days before being yanked, suggesting they reached the target audience before removal.” And they also found a lot of questionable videos still readily available. Wojcicki 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. 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.”

Facebook has faced the most scrutiny over political ads. The platform doesn’t take down ads that clearly contain false information. On CBS This Morning, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said:

“What I believe is that in a democracy, it’s really important that people can see for themselves what politicians are saying, so they can make their own judgments. And, you know, I don’t think that a private company should be censoring politicians or news.”