On 8th December the so-called safe harbour deadline passed which all but seals Joe Biden’s place as the forthcoming US President.
While former The Apprentice host, Donald Trump continues to cry foul regarding the elections, it is widely recognised that his administration’s legal challenges are fruitless and that he is on his way out of the White House.
In a bid to counter any disinformation to contrary, YouTube has drawn a hardline in the sand.
“Yesterday was the safe harbor deadline for the U.S. Presidential election and enough states have certified their election results to determine a President-elect. Given that, we will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections. For example, we will remove videos claiming that a Presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or counting errors. We will begin enforcing this policy today, and will ramp up in the weeks to come,” YouTube explained in a blog post.
While YouTube says that news coverage and commentary will not be removed from the site so long as there is sufficient education, documentary or artistic context.
The firm goes on to explain how users have been consuming election content. While only a “small portion” of watch time is for election-related content (because obviously everybody is watching Claire Saffitz’s Dessert Person) 88 percent of that watch is going to what YouTube deems authoritative sources.
These sources include ABC News, NBC News, USA Today, CNN and CBS News.
YouTube also highlighted the success of its war against misinformation, disinformation and outright lies on the platform.
Part of this war involved highlighting authoritative sources through information panels.
“Collectively, these information panels have been shown over 4.5 billion times. Starting today, we will update this information panel, linking to the ‘2020 Electoral College Results’ page from the Office of the Federal Register, noting that as of December 8, states have certified Presidential election results, with Joe Biden as the President-elect. It will also continue to include a link to CISA [Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency], explaining that states certify results after ensuring ballots are properly counted and correcting irregularities and errors,” YouTube added.
We do wonder what the likes of OANN are going to do. Not that we’ll miss their presence on YouTube should the channel ever disappear.
