In an attempt to stop all anti-vaccine misinformation, YouTube said that it won’t allow videos that claim vaccines approved by health authorities are dangerous or don’t work.
The platform is also banning prominent anti-vaccine activists.
Photo via Mashable SEA
According to The Verge, this new policy even expands to block misinformation around other vaccines as well, including the flu shot, the HPV vaccine, the Hepatitis B vaccine and the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine.
Videos that inaccurately claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism or that the flu shot causes cancer or infertility, or that the vaccines contain trackers, for example, will not be allowed under the new policy.
The new policy puts YouTube in line with Facebook and Twitter.
In February, Facebook said it would remove posts with erroneous claims about vaccines, including assertions that vaccines cause autism or that it is safer for people to contract the coronavirus than to receive vaccinations against it.
A month later in March, Twitter also introduced its own policy that explained the penalties for sharing lies about the coronavirus and vaccines. But the platform has a “five strikes rule” before it permanently bars people for violating its coronavirus misinformation policy.
Photo via TechCrunch
YouTube said that in the past year, it had removed over 130,000 videos for violating its COVID-19 vaccine policies, but this did not include what the video platform called “borderline videos” that discussed vaccine skepticism on the site.
In the past, the company simply removed such videos from search results and recommendations, while promoting videos from experts and public health institutions.
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By: Aishah Akashah Ahadiat
