Brad Parscale: Google Censoring Trump Ads Because ‘2016 Freaked Them Out’

Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale condemned Google’s policy of restricting microtargeted ads in an interview for Fox News this weekend. Parscale theorizes that Google’s management made the decision while saying, “Oh my God, we’ve got to stop them. They’re going to win again in a landslide and we can’t be part of it.”

“2016 freaked them out because I used a whole bunch of liberal platforms to do it,” Parscale told Fox. “I guarantee you, this decision came from another room full of people going, ‘Oh my God, we’ve got to stop them. They’re going to win again in a landslide and we can’t be part of it.'”

Leaked internal footage obtained and published by Breitbart News last year showed Google executives melting down in the days following the 2016 election, with co-founder Sergey Brin saying he was “deeply offended” by Trump’s election.

Google has said it will not allow political campaigns to “microtarget” ads based on political affiliation, meaning that political parties will not be allowed to send their ads to the people most likely to be interested in them. The Trump campaign is widely believed to have excelled at this tactic in 2016.

Parscale compared Google’s move to telephone companies preventing phonecalls.

“These are new tech ways of stopping connections,” he told Fox. “If I went on TV right now and said, ‘The telephone companies aren’t allowing me to call people,’ all heck would break loose. Right? It’s exactly what they did. They just did it with a different connection.”

Google-owned YouTube, to which the new ads policy will also apply, has already engaged in widespread censorship of Trump ads. An investigation by 60 Minutes earlier this month found that over 300 of President Trump’s political ads have been removed from the platform.

Are you an insider at Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com. 

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.