In an effort to close the stable door long after the horse has bolted, YouTube announced on Tuesday that it plans to roll out “fact check information panels” on their platform in the United States. The company instituted similar fake news detectors in Brazil and India last year. The recent rise in misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic, the origins of the virus, and the potential of over-the-counter cures seems to have inspired them to bring the feature to American users.
“Our fact check information panels provide fresh context in these situations by highlighting relevant third-party fact-checked articles above search results for relevant queries, so that our viewers can make their own informed decision about claims made in the news,” the company writes in a new blog post.
Essentially, this means any time you search on YouTube for a trending piece of fake news, like, say, “coronavirus bleach cure,” you’ll see a curated notification at the top of your screen explaining why the story is BS and helpfully linking you to a relevant source. A number of third-party publishers are assisting the company in their efforts, including The Dispatch, FactCheck.org, Politifact, and the Washington Post Fact Checker. YouTube also plans to donate one million dollars to the International Fact-Checking Network in order to further support information verification efforts around the world.
While YouTube might be a little late to the party when it comes to stopping the spread of misinformation on their website, the company has clearly been making an effort in the last few years to get harmful content off of their platform, including demonetizing bizarre videos aimed at kids and banning lunatic grifters like Alex Jones. This latest initiative will take a little time to be fully operational but will continue to improve over time. So, the country should have a relatively well-informed populous sometime around the 2028 general election.
[via Mashable]
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21 Comments
It’s nice that they think this will change anything at this late date. Also, FIRST.
Also, cancerAIDS.
you remembered. <3
thank god the selfless billionaires behind Big Tech have volunteered to babysit my brain
Or they could just, you know, ban these videos? Like no person who has to look up that bleach won’t cure COVID-19 is going to believe anything anyone says otherwise.
The obvious counter is, should Youtube have banned videos explaining the advantages of wearing face masks when the WHO was still dragging their ass on that recommendation?
I feel that’s a false equivalence. A face mask won’t kill you; injecting bleach bleach into your body definitely will.
Oh, look at the smart guy over here who doesn’t believe in the power of cleaning supplies. There’s a reason why I eat Tide Pods and no government is going to take away my freedom.
It’s time to admit online channels should be treated like traditional media channels. It’s how the majority of people get their information.
I was wondering what their response would be to some of the more out there conspiracy theories.“We don’t even know how to begin explaining to you that the belief America is being run by subterranean lizard people is wrong.”
Essentially, this means any time you search on YouTube for a trending piece of fake news, like, say, “coronavirus bleach cure,”
you’ll see a curated notification at the top of your screen explaining
why the story is BS and helpfully linking you to a relevant source.
Doubt this will have any significant impact on my MAGA bleach injection tutorial channel.
Instead of relying on a social media aggregator to decide on the merits of various claims people could instead establish credibility with accuracy bonds and prediction markets. However, there’s little interest in these because hardly anybody prioritizes accuracy. Pundit careers are not hurt by having a long track record of failure (track records aren’t actually tracked), and indeed the people who promoted the theory that Iraq had WMD and it was necessary to invade have done better than those who predicted an invasion would achieve nothing.
Wonderful points, and therein lies the problem. At the end of the day, it’s the responsibility of the end user to use critical thinking, reason, and fact-checking to determine whether something is believable or dangerous. However, that takes time, skill, knowledge, and ability some people lack, necessitating this sort of check on dangerous dis- and mis-information.Unfortunately, it’s been the goal of many malicious groups (primarily the GOP for decades, but other organizations as well) to sow doubt and distrust to existing institutions so that there no longer are any trustworthy authority on anything, leading the gullible and naive nowhere to turn to for reliable, fact-based information other than those peddling pure emotional- and prejudice-based dis- and mis-information. This has lead to the fundamental epistemological crisis we currently live in where a number of people earnestly believe injecting disinfectant can be a coronovirus cure.
This just what their reptilian overlords want you to think
So they want to look responsible while still making money off of conspiratorial nonsense. Well isn’t that nice.
Given that every video I’ve watched for the last two weeks has been preceded by a commercial for a conspiracy theory newspaper, I’m wondering if these measure will extend to their own ad sales department.
Came here from a 15 minute Tucker Carlson video on YouTube talking about how YouTube is covering up the truth.
Oh why?
I hope they don’t find my channel where I discuss the Kinja conspiracy to keep me in the greys forever.
A bit of a tangent, but I’ve been noticing a lot of ads before my YouTube videos for cryptocurrency websites. It seems like the people who trade these currencies are really capitalising on the economy’s freefall at the moment to try and snag uncertain, possibly quite poor people into experimenting with different monetary systems. Which troubles me a bit.
I saw a theory that bigger ad clients are scaling down their ad spending lately, allowing more bottom-feeders to bubble up.