Trump ads intended for Middle Georgia voters taken down. Here’s why they were reinstated

An advertisement for the Donald Trump reelection campaign that was aimed at Black voters in Middle Georgia was removed by Google last week and then reinstated, the company confirmed to The Telegraph.

A political action committee helping Trump has begun buying digital microtargeted ads that appear on YouTube and elsewhere, an election data group found. They say Trump-related accounts have spent $304,000 to $353,500 nationwide this year.

The Middle Georgia ad created a firestorm of comments on social media, even drawing a communication from the former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who claimed “Google is censoring this pro-Trump ad to protect (President Joe) Biden.” Trump Jr. even asked his followers on X, formerly known as Twitter, to help him make the ad go viral.

Google says it made a mistake. “This enforcement decision was made in error,” a Google spokesman told The Telegraph, and “it was appealed by the advertiser and quickly overturned upon further review. This ad is currently running.”

The ad features a Biden campaign worker on the phone with a man who voted for Biden in 2020. The voter says “everything costs more” since Biden took office, including rent. The worker then says Biden is helping pay rent for “newcomers.”

“You mean illegal immigrants?” the voter says. “I’m struggling to pay my bills, but Biden’s paying rent for illegals? They get handouts, and I’m paying for it. Things were better before Biden. I’m voting for Trump.”

Make America Great Again, Trump’s super PAC, spent about $15,000 on the ads and ran them starting April 25 in specific communities near Macon, according to social media posts from Andrew Arenge, director of operations for the University of Pennsylvania’s program on opinion research and election studies. Arenge keeps data on how much Trump and Biden have spent on digital ads.

Arenge made multiple X postings this weekend about how the ads were pulled and then apparently reinstated.

At least two conservative news sources were quick to write about the Middle Georgia ads being temporarily stopped, with one, the Tampa Free Press, saying “Big Tech is already seeking to help President Biden, who is failing and flailing, stay in office.”

Biden narrowly won Georgia by a margin of 0.23% and 11,779 votes in 2020. The Trump campaign has talked openly in recent weeks about its desire to attract more Black voters by flipping Democratic constituencies.