POLICY
POLICY
POLICY
YouTube will crack down on misleading political content for 2020 elections
Google LLC’s video sharing giant YouTube said on Monday that it plans to weed out any unreliable content that appears on its platform as the 2020 elections get underway.
The company said that though it already had policies in place to curtail the spread of misinformation, it has now introduced deceptive-practices policies that will better combat unreliable content related specifically to the elections.
First and perhaps foremost, this will mean removing technically doctored content that poses “serious risk of egregious harm” to a political candidate. The rise of the “deepfake” video as the elections approached has already become a matter of concern for some.
YouTube also said it will take a zero tolerance stance to anyone posting deceptive information relating to the census process, such as incorrect information about voting dates. On top of that, any channel that gives out false technical information about a candidate will be taken down. YouTube gave the example of the incorrect citizenship status of a particular person that would make them not eligible to serve in office.
Moreover, channels will be deleted from the platform if they “impersonate another person or channel, misrepresent their country of origin, or conceal their association with a government actor.” Lastly, channels will be removed if they are found to have been artificially increasing the number of views, likes, or comments on their videos.
“As always, we enforce our policies consistently, without regard to a video’s political viewpoint,” YouTube said. “The best way to quickly remove content is to stay ahead of new technologies and tactics that could be used by malicious actors, including technically-manipulated content.”
The company will have quite a job on its hands seeing that every minute around 500 hours of content are uploaded to the site. YouTube now relies heavily on it “Intelligence Desk” to deal with misleading content, whether that’s homegrown or from foreign bad actors.
YouTube said it has improved in how it separates unreliable and reliable sources of information, giving more reliable sources a more authoritative ranking.
Photo: Rego Korosi/Flickr
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