While Donald Trump still refuses, more than a month after the US presidential election, to concede defeat to Democrat Joe Biden, YouTube has announced that it will remove as of Wednesday, December 9 any content claiming that a “Massive fraud or errors” changed the outcome of the November 3 ballot.
YouTube critics have long called for the company to stop hosting disinformation videos meant to undermine confidence in election results. “Enough states have certified their election results to determine an elected president. For this reason, we will begin to remove any content posted today (or any time after) that misleads people into claiming that massive fraud or mistakes altered the outcome of the presidential election. American 2020 ”, the video streaming giant said in a blog post on Wednesday.
End of the moratorium on political advertising
The Californian company specifies that this policy is in line with the one it applied in the previous American elections. Videos claiming that a presidential candidate won through “Massive software bugs or counting errors” will be so “Withdrawn”, is it specified in this post.
“We will begin to apply this policy today, and we will intensify our efforts in the weeks to come”, continues the company, a subsidiary of Google since 2006. “As always, journalistic coverage and [vidéos exprimant des] opinions on these subjects may remain on our site if they contain sufficient educational, documentary, scientific or artistic context ”, she specifies. YouTube believes that the “Problematic disinformation” represents less than 1% of what is seen on its platform in the United States, without advancing precise data.
Google, the parent company of the video-sharing platform, has also confirmed that it has ended the moratorium on political ads put in place during the campaign to avoid overflows. “If we no longer regard the post-election period as a sensitive event, we will continue to rigorously enforce our advertising measures, which formally prohibit clearly erroneous information that could significantly undermine confidence in the elections or the democratic process.”, Google told Agence France-Presse.
