SAN FRANCISCO: YouTube said on Wednesday it might remove videos that falsely claim approved vaccines are dangerous, as social networks seek to clamp down on health misinformation around Covid-19 and other diseases.
Video-sharing giant YouTube has already banned posts that spread false myths around coronavirus treatments, including ones that share inaccurate claims about Covid-19 vaccines shown to be safe.
But the Google-owned site said its concerns about the spread of medical conspiracy theories went beyond the pandemic.
“We’ve steadily seen false claims about the coronavirus vaccines spill over into misinformation about vaccines generally ,” the Google-owned website said during a statement.
“We’re now at some extent where it’s more important than ever to expand the work we started with Covid-19 to other vaccines.” The expanded policy will apply to “currently administered vaccines that are approved and confirmed to be safe and effective by local health authorities and therefore the WHO (World Health Organisation).” it’ll see false claims about routine immunisations for diseases like measles and hepatitis B faraway from YouTube.
These would come with cases where vloggers have claimed that approved vaccines don’t work, or wrongly linked them to chronic health effects.
Content that “falsely says that approved vaccines cause autism, cancer or infertility, or that substances in vaccines can track those that receive them” also will be taken down.
“As with any significant update, it’ll take time for our systems to completely build up enforcement,” YouTube added.
It stressed there would be exceptions to the new guidelines, with personal testimonials of negative experiences with vaccines still allowed, goodbye as “the channel doesn’t show a pattern of promoting vaccine hesitancy.” YouTube said it had removed quite 130,000 videos since last year for violating its Covid-19 vaccine policies.
On Tuesday, the corporate told German media that it had blocked the German-language channels of Russia’s state broadcaster RT for violating its Covid misinformation guidelines.
