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Google won't say why it took down more than 300 Trump ads

More than 300 ads made by Donald Trump's campaign have been removed from Google and YouTube. Why? The platforms won't say.

The discovery was made by 60 Minutes in the course of reporting a story about YouTube's struggle to fight hate speech. Ironically, though, while the ads were listed in YouTube's "Transparency Report," there was no actual transparency as to why the videos were removed.

Unsurprisingly, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki played coy when asked about the ads by 60 Minutes' Leslie Stahl.

Stahl says it pretty succinctly in the above clip: "There's no transparency in the transparency report."

What makes the whole thing even weirder — or more infuriating, depending on your tolerance for social media chicanery — is that YouTube was just fine with a controversial ad from the Trump campaign that leveled false accusations at Democratic candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden over ties to the Ukraine.

You can check out the report on the Trump ads for yourself here.

But you'll also notice two other things about the ads that were taken down, as noted by Stahl and 60 Minutes. First, the ads still run for days at a time, very likely reaching their targeted base anyway. For instance, one ad ran for 19 days before being removed.

Second, Google (which owns YouTube) still gets paid anyway, even if the ad is removed.

The 60 Minutes report comes less than two weeks after Google reported new efforts to restrict political ad targeting and made some clarifications to other rules, like disallowing ads with "deep fakes."

SEE ALSO: Snapchat says, unlike Facebook, it will fact-check political ads

The company also announced it would ban ads that included "misleading claims about the census process, and ads or destinations making demonstrably false claims that could significantly undermine participation or trust in an electoral or democratic process."

But even Google admits this is a half-assed promise in the next sentence, which reads, "Of course, we recognize that robust political dialogue is an important part of democracy, and no one can sensibly adjudicate every political claim, counterclaim, and insinuation. So we expect that the number of political ads on which we take action will be very limited—but we will continue to do so for clear violations."

TL;DR, "We'll kinda try to police ads filled with lies, but what really is a 'lie' anyway?"

On 60 Minutes, the way Wojcicki waved away Stahl's questions about YouTube's inconsistent policy and its even more inconsistent implementation of that policy would make Mark Zuckerberg proud.

It's also worth noting that even when Google takes a stand against running political ads, as it did with the recent elections in Canada, it still manages to completely obfuscate the process despite claims of transparency, like one big shrug emoji.

We've reached out to Google and YouTube about the story and if there's any reason why their transparency report has very little transparency in it. If we hear back, we'll update the story.

Mashable