YouTube Is Intensifying Efforts to Fight Harmful Misinformation

Being the largest video-sharing social media platform, YouTube inevitably faces plenty of unique challenges on a day-to-day basis. One of the most pressing concerns is the role it plays in enabling the spread of harmful misinformation. Right alongside Facebook, YouTube is often identified as the main source of false and potentially damaging content on the Internet. Furthermore, given how the platform’s Recommendations system works, it easily beats any competition in that respect.

Talking about how the company plans to address these challenges in the future, Neal Mohan, Chief Product Officer for the platform, says YouTube will improve its automated detection algorithms and train human moderators to spot and stop such information before it becomes viral. To do this, they will expand the video classification system and provide the platform’s AI with plenty of relevant data for training.

Cross-platform sharing is another point of worry for YouTube. The company says it can moderate and limit any content in its own home but not influence other websites where people choose to re-share or embed such videos containing harmful misinformation. As a way to tackle this, YouTube is considering deactivating the share function or breaking the link on videos that are not promoted through Recommendations.

The company says it is broadening its efforts to fight harmful misinformation to cover more than a hundred countries and dozens of languages. YouTube promises it will consider the cultural characteristics of every country by recruiting local people in each region and establishing regional content moderation centers.

Do you find YouTube’s misinformation combat initiatives to be a manifestation of censorship? How easily do you trust the information you view here? Tell us what you think in the comments to this post!