YouTube Changes Policy To Allow False Claims About Past US Presidential Elections

YouTube will cease eradicating content material that falsely claims the 2020 election or different previous U.S. presidential elections had been marred by “widespread fraud, errors or glitches,” the platform introduced Friday.

The change is a reversal for the Google-owned video service, which mentioned a month after the 2020 election that it could begin eradicating new posts that falsely claimed widespread voter fraud or errors modified the result.

YouTube mentioned in a weblog submit that the up to date coverage was an try to guard the flexibility to “overtly debate political concepts, even these which might be controversial or based mostly on disproven assumptions.”

“Within the present setting, we discover that whereas eradicating this content material does curb some misinformation, it might even have the unintended impact of curbing political speech with out meaningfully lowering the danger of violence or different real-world hurt,” the weblog submit mentioned.

The up to date coverage, which matches into impact instantly, gained’t cease YouTube from taking down content material that tries to deceive voters within the upcoming 2024 election, or different future races within the U.S. and overseas. The corporate mentioned its different current guidelines in opposition to election misinformation stay unchanged.

This might show tough to implement, mentioned John Wihbey, an affiliate professor at Northeastern College who research social media and misinformation.

“It doesn’t take a genius should you’re on the disinformation ‘we had been wronged in 2020’ facet to say, ‘wait a minute, let’s simply declare that voting simply typically shouldn’t be price it. And 2020 is our instance,” he mentioned. “I don’t know the way you disentangle rhetoric that each refers to previous wrongs and to ahead prospects. The content material moderation staff, which goes to attempt to do that, goes to tie themselves in knots attempting to determine precisely the place that line is.”

The announcement comes after YouTube and different main social media firms, together with Twitter and the Meta-owned Fb and Instagram, have come beneath hearth in recent times for not doing extra to fight the firehose of election misinformation and disinformation that spreads on their platforms.

The left-leaning media watchdog group Media Issues mentioned the coverage change shouldn’t be a shock, because it was one of many “final main social media platforms” to maintain the coverage in place.

“YouTube and the opposite platforms that preceded it in weakening their election misinformation insurance policies, like Fb, have made it clear that one tried rebellion wasn’t sufficient. They’re setting the stage for an encore,” mentioned its vice chairman Julie Millican in a press release.