YouTube announced that anti-vaxxers will no longer be welcome on the video-hosting platform, reports The Washington Post.
YouTube already had a policy in place to ban videos that make false claims about the coronavirus vaccine. This latest announcement extends the ban to other vaccines as well. As part of the new policy, YouTube removed the accounts of high-profile vaccine skeptics Joseph Mercola and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
"We'll remove claims that vaccines are dangerous or cause a lot of health effects, that vaccines cause autism, cancer, infertility or contain microchips," Matt Halprin, YouTube's vice president of global trust and safety, told the Post.
From the article:
YouTube, Facebook and Twitter all banned misinformation about the coronavirus early on in the pandemic. But false claims continue to run rampant across all three of the platforms. The social networks are also tightly connected, with YouTube often serving as a library of videos that go viral on Twitter or Facebook. YouTube has removed over 133,000 videos for broadcasting coronavirus misinformation, Halprin said.
The companies have hired thousands of moderators and used high-tech image- and text-recognition algorithms to try to police misinformation. There are also millions of people with legitimate concerns about the medical system, and social media is a place where they go to ask real questions and express their concerns and fears, something the companies don't want to squelch.
