YouTube To Label State-Funded Broadcasters in Drive Against Misinformation
02 February 2018 - 9:59PM
Dow Jones News
By Jack Nicas
YouTube said it is planning changes to give users more context
for videos promoting conspiracy theories or state-sponsored
content, the latest effort by an internet giant to clean up its
platform amid criticism over its role in spreading
misinformation.
YouTube said it would on Friday start labeling all videos from
what it identifies as state-funded broadcasters. The step would
affect a range of sources, including the U.S.'s Public Broadcasting
Service, or PBS. But it is significant in part because YouTube has
been a major conduit for RT, the Russian state news organization
that U.S. intelligence officials called "the Kremlin's principal
international propaganda outlet."
YouTube--part of Alphabet Inc.'s Google unit--is also
considering surfacing relevant videos from credible news sources
alongside clips peddling conspiracy theories, such as those
claiming the moon landing was a hoax, YouTube Chief Product Officer
Neal Mohan said in an interview. YouTube has long been rife with
such videos.
The company said that change was early in development, so it's
unclear when it would take effect--or how it would select
conspiracy theories.
Google and other Silicon Valley giants have scrambled in recent
months to address a wave of criticism from Congress, academics, and
others how their platforms influence public opinion and discourse.
The debate was stoked in part by evidence that Russian actors
seeking to manipulate U.S. voters before and after the 2016
election reached more than 100 million people via the tech giants'
sites.
After initially playing down the influence of their platforms
last year, the companies have offered a string of mea culpas and
proposed solutions. Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg
pledged last month to fix problems on his site, including by
promoting "broadly trusted" news sources. Twitter Inc. said this
week that is has notified roughly 1.4 million people who interacted
with accounts now known to be backed by a Russian government-linked
group.
Journalists and academics over the past year uncovered an
abundance of objectionable content on YouTube, including videos
that promoted racist and extremist views and put children in
compromising situations. In many cases, YouTube ran ads before the
unsavory videos, prompting many top advertisers to pull spending
from the site.
Mr. Mohan said that he last year directed his team to improve
YouTube as a place to get news, including moves to promote "an
ever-changing list of authoritative news sources" that it selects
with the Google News team.
"The principle here is to provide more information to our users,
and let our users make the judgment themselves, as opposed to us
being in the business of providing any sort of editorial judgment
on any of these things ourselves," he said.
He declined to comment on RT, which as of late last year had
nearly 5.5 billion views across more than 20 YouTube channels--
among the site's most-watched news networks.
The new policy to label state broadcasters would extend to any
news organization that received government funding, he said. So
RT's videos will have a label appended to the bottom that says, "RT
is funded in whole or in part by the Russian government."
PBS will carry a label calling it a "publicly-funded American
broadcaster."
YouTube in recent months also quietly expanded a change to its
search engine, in order to return more mainstream news sources for
news-related queries.
YouTube first tweaked its search results for breaking news in
October after it was criticized for surfacing conspiracy theories
about a mass shooting that killed 59 people during a concert in Las
Vegas.
The change appears to have improved the search results for some
key news events that have attracted conspiracies. Three days after
the Las Vegas shooting, for instance, the fifth result for a search
on YouTube about the attacks was a video titled: "Proof Las Vegas
Shooting Was a FALSE FLAG attack--Shooter on 4th Floor." But on
Thursday night, the results were all mainstream news sources.
The policy hasn't always worked, though. On Wednesday, after a
train carrying some Republican lawmakers collided with a truck,
searches for "GOP train crash" on YouTube returned as the first
result a live stream from Alex Jones, the founder of
conspiracy-theory site Infowars, and as the third a video titled,
"Train Crash Attempted Assassination of GOP Congress Members?"
YouTube said its algorithm hadn't quickly enough recognized the
search as a news-related query.
"With several other major events over the past few months we
have been pleased with the results, but there is more work to do,"
it added.
Write to Jack Nicas at jack.nicas@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 02, 2018 05:44 ET (10:44 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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