YouTube guarantees to remove all the false election-related contents that were feeding misinformation to the public. Therefore, the plan to mislead the decision of voters and stem online disinformation came to a halt. But this a surprising incident as YouTube never took initiatives to control such controversial political videos. YouTube is taking the necessary measures to become a “more reliable source” for trustworthy news, and they are promoting “healthy political discourse” to reduce the chaos caused by fake news around the world. They have a strict rule to ban the video without any regard to a video’s political viewpoint.
Nevertheless, this is a big challenge to YouTube as the site uploads about 500 videos a minute. And it’s a tedious task to go through every video and go through its authenticity. They are going to focus on a video’s context and content to determine it’s legitimacy, and it hopefully helps control misleading information. Furthermore, this plan backlashes as the algorithms may push people towards extremist and radical views by engaging them more into such contents.
Overall, this move by YouTube is challenging during the election cycle ramp-ups. YouTube has to deal with the issue that there is no “one size fits all method.” They cannot determine which kind of political statements and speeches cross a line. To ensure this, Google’s head of online and trust and safety states, “We take our responsibility seriously to protect our users from harm and abuse, especially during elections.” Now, hopefully, the election process is going to be fair and just.
In regards to the US campaign:
YouTube has taken a bold step by banning delusive ads and political disinformation. To avoid the mishap of 2016, they are determined not to allow YouTube to con the users in this campaign. With the collective effort of other platforms, they plan to develop consistent, clear, shared, and enforceable rules. The trust and safety team plans to globe the monitor and destroy account hijacking that invites easy disinformation campaigns. YouTube is also working with technology companies like the FBI to identify the culprits and disable their accounts. Hence, these steps are definitely to protect voters from confusing election content.
What is YouTube’s primary focus?
YouTube is explicitly focusing on banning videos that gave users the wrong voting date or those who outspread false information. Similarly, a serious risk like technically manipulating is a significant crime. If someone falsifies a government official’s death, the video will face a severe penalty. YouTube gave “more flexibility” to respond to misinformation. It plans to upgrade the system for the eviction of manipulated videos like deep fakes. Deep fakes are videos under artificial intelligence which manages to make subjects look a different way or say words that they did not say.
Also, YouTube will abolish channels that try to imitate and impersonate another channel or person. Likewise, you aren’t allowed to conceal your identity and country of origin or hide anything from the government. They can even detect automated systems that boost the number of views, comments, and likes. It looks like their new rule will bring changes in filtering the right kind of videos.
What are other social sites doing to control falsified political news?
Spreading false news and false election-related contents is prevalent even on Facebook as well. Thus to overcome it, they were removing the videos manipulated by artificial intelligence, which was misleading the viewers. Similarly, Twitter has wholly banned shady political ads.
Will banning the falsified contents help with the upcoming elections? Comment down below!
