YouTube To Remove Election Fraud Claims; Will Trump's Videos Be Deleted?
KEY POINTS
- YouTube will be more aggressive with its election-related content regulation going forward
- Video and channels pushing narratives that the election was stolen will no longer be tolerated
- YouTube specifically mentioned some of Donald Trump's favorite conspiracies, but it's unknown whether they will actually police Trump's content
YouTube announced Wednesday that it will be banning content that questions the result of the 2020 presidential election. In a press release, the online video-sharing platform specifically prohibited some of the unsubstantiated theories pushed by President Donald Trump.
Content “that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election” will be removed. News and meta-commentary will still be allowed.
Disinformation has long been banned, but there had been some leeway due to the "safe-harbor" dates for election certification had not yet passed.
On Tuesday, the federal deadline known as the safe-harbor day, marked the latest formal step to seal Joe Biden's presidential election victory, justifying YouTube’s more stringent stance.
YouTube also released some data on their efforts to prevent the circulation of misinformation. Over 8,000 channels have been removed for violating election-related terms of service with even more videos taken down. About 77% of the removed videos had less than 100 views.
YouTube's information page will be updated to indicate that Biden is the president-elect and link to the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency to explain how state certification works.
“We will remove videos claiming that a Presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or counting errors,” the press release said. “We will begin enforcing this policy today, and will ramp up in the weeks to come.”
Both of those examples are favorites of Trump, who said in a medal ceremony just days earlier that the “totally rigged” election had been decided by conspiracy-laden computer errors.
“Machines that nobody knows ownership, they have glitches, as they call them, glitches, glitches that weren’t glitches,” he said. “They got caught sending out thousands of votes, all against me.”
1/ Our goal this election was to connect people to authoritative info, limit harmful misinfo & remove violative content. Subsequently, authoritative news was widely watched & recommended, and since Sept, we removed 8K channels for violating our policies. https://t.co/3It2xphe70
— YouTubeInsider (@YouTubeInsider) December 9, 2020
3/ We’ll also update today our election results info panel, which already surfaced under 200k vids and was shown 4.5b times. It’ll note that U.S. Presidential election results are certified & link to the 2020 Electoral College Results page by the Office of the Federal Register.
— YouTubeInsider (@YouTubeInsider) December 9, 2020
4/ There’s always more to do. Striking the balance between openness & responsibility is one of our toughest challenges. We’re continuing to make improvements & will apply our learnings from this election, globally. https://t.co/0dIafOULsW
— YouTubeInsider (@YouTubeInsider) December 9, 2020
It's unclear if YouTube will immediately pull videos from Trump, who has 2.52 million subscribers.
Trump’s YouTube channel has a 46-minute video that includes him saying, "I am determined to protect our election system which is now under coordinated assault and siege" and that he "will detail some of the shocking irregularities, abuses and fraud that have been revealed in recent weeks."
Biden will assume the presidency on Jan. 20.
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