YouTube is taking action to prevent anti-vaccine content, the platform announced new measures to combat misinformation. The company reported that it will remove any content that misinforms or provides false news about approved vaccines.
YouTube is taking measures against anti-vaccine content
YouTube’s new policy will apply to “currently administered vaccines that are approved and confirmed to be safe and effective by local health authorities and the WHO (World Health Organization).”
From now on, YouTube will take a proactive approach to vaccinations. “Specifically, content that falsely alleges that approved vaccines are dangerous and cause chronic health effects, claims that vaccines do not reduce transmission or contraction of disease, or contains misinformation on the substances contained in vaccines will be removed,” said YouTube officials in their blog post.
With this measure, the social video platform applied a radical veto on all anti-vaccine content, including positions against immunization systems against measles or hepatitis B, in addition to COVID-19 and all the myths that have pointed to possible causes of infertility, cancer, autism, magnetism or 5G connectivity in the body, which has gone viral over the last year.
Exceptions to these strict measures will apply. If the content is about a valid discussion there will be no actions against it.
“We may also make exceptions if the purpose of the content is to condemn, dispute, or satirize misinformation that violates our policies. We may also make exceptions for content showing an open public forum, like a protest or public hearing, provided the content does not aim to promote misinformation that violates our policies,” Youtube said.
Under these new rules, an offending channel will be removed from YouTube if it repeats a violation of this rule three times within the last 90 days.
Prior to the establishment of this content filter, YouTube’s old community standards already had some measures in place to prohibit some types of questionable medical information content. According to YouTube in its statement, the company has made some modifications to the procedure to respond to the pandemic situation, which included removing over 130 thousand videos with disinformation about COVID-19 during the previous year.
