Google-owned video platform YouTube has announced plans to remove any content that questions Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 U.S. presidential election despite the fact that legal challenges involving multiple states continue. YouTube also announced it will be promoting “authoritative news sources,” such as NBC and CBS in video recommendations.
In a recent blog post titled “Supporting the 2020 U.S. election,” Google-owned video-sharing platform YouTube announced plans to remove any content that questions Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 U.S. presidential election or implies fraud impacted the election outcome.
In the blog post, YouTube writes:
Yesterday was the safe harbor deadline for the U.S. Presidential election and enough states have certified their election results to determine a President-elect. Given that, we will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections. For example, we will remove videos claiming that a Presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or counting errors. We will begin enforcing this policy today, and will ramp up in the weeks to come. As always, news coverage and commentary on these issues can remain on our site if there’s sufficient education, documentary, scientific or artistic context.
YouTube also announced that it will be promoting “authoritative news sources,” such as NBC and CBS:
Now let’s look at recommendations, one of the main ways our viewers find content. Limiting the reach of borderline content and prominently surfacing authoritative information are important ways we protect people from problematic content that doesn’t violate our Community Guidelines. Over 70% of recommendations on election-related topics came from authoritative news sources and the top recommended videos and channels for election-related content were primarily authoritative news. In fact, the top 10 authoritative news channels were recommended over 14X more than the top 10 non-authoritative channels on election-related content.
YouTube also included a graphic showing the most-viewed U.S. election-related content on the platform, with ABC News ranking the highest:
Story cited here.
