Giving Compass' Take:
- Experts at Futurity discuss the parameters and highly variable implications of YouTube's recent vaccine misinformation ban.
- How might this encourage other platforms to crack down on vaccine misinformation? How might consumers simply move to alternate social media sites in seeking the news they want to find?
- Read more about how we can dispel myths surrounding COVID-19 vaccines.
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YouTube has announced it will no longer allow content containing misinformation about any vaccines that health authorities have approved and confirmed to be safe and effective.
The new guidelines include some notable exceptions, allowing for publishers to post “content about vaccine policies, new vaccine trials, and historical vaccine successes or failures,” and “personal testimonies relating to vaccines.”
Just as soon as the COVID-19 global pandemic spread like wildfire in early 2020, so did misinformation about how the virus spreads, who’s most susceptible, and more.
In response, YouTube updated its community guidelines to prohibit content creators from publishing videos containing COVID-19 misinformation. Now, the social media titan is once again revamping its community guidelines, this time taking aim at content creators trying to push anti-vaccine propaganda.
Gianluca Stringhini, assistant professor of computer and electrical engineering and a research fellow at Boston University’s Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, researches the spread of malicious activity on the internet. Nina Cesare, a postdoctoral associate at the Boston University School of Public Health, uses machine learning to study digital data and how it impacts society.
Here, the two experts in cybersecurity and online communities explain what YouTube’s latest decision to censor vaccine misinformation means, and whether it could backfire:
Gianluca Stringhini: I think that this policy is going in the right direction. There is a fine line to be walked between dangerous misinformation and free speech, and I think that a policy allowing [open] debate about public health measures like vaccine mandates is reasonable.
Cesare: I support efforts to identify and block the spread of vaccine misinformation on social media. If we can take steps toward ensuring [online] posts only spread verified information, it is possible that collective vaccine skepticism will drop.
Read the full article about YouTube's vaccine misinformation ban at Futurity.