YouTube on Wednesday announced its new policy on medical misinformation, saying it will remove videos that falsely claim approved vaccines are dangerous and cause chronic health effects. Google’s video-sharing company said that the false claims about vaccines against coronavirus disease (Covid-19) “spill over into misinformation about vaccines in general.”
“Today, we're expanding our medical misinformation policies on YouTube with new guidelines on currently administered vaccines that are approved and confirmed to be safe and effective by local health authorities and the WHO,” YouTube said in a statement.
In the initial days of the Covid vaccine development, YouTube was inundated with conspiracy theory videos, one of them even claiming that Microsoft’s Bill Gates was planning to track everyone through a substance mixed with vaccines. Gates had then called it a “bad combination of pandemic and social media.”
YouTube said the new policy would target the content falsely claiming that approved vaccines cause autism, cancer or infertility, or that “substances in vaccines can track those who receive them.” It further stated that policies would not only cover specific routine immunizations but also apply to general statements about vaccines.
“[O]ur new guidance on vaccine side effects maps to public vaccine resources provided by health authorities and backed by medical consensus. These policy changes will go into effect today, and as with any significant update, it will take time for our systems to fully ramp up enforcement,” the company said.
{{/usCountry}}“[O]ur new guidance on vaccine side effects maps to public vaccine resources provided by health authorities and backed by medical consensus. These policy changes will go into effect today, and as with any significant update, it will take time for our systems to fully ramp up enforcement,” the company said.
{{/usCountry}}YouTube will continue to allow content about “vaccine policies, new vaccine trials, and historical vaccine successes or failures" on the video-sharing platform.
“Working closely with health authorities, we looked to balance our commitment to an open platform with the need to remove egregious harmful content,” the company added.