YouTube Is Fighting Conspiracy Theories With 'Authoritative' Context and Outside Links (theverge.com)

In an effort to reduce misinformation on YouTube, the video-sharing website will be adding "authoritative" context to search results about conspiracy-prone topics, as well as putting $25 million toward news outlets producing videos. YouTube made the announcement today as part of a new step in its Google News Initiative, a journalism-focused program that aims to help publishers earn revenue and combat fake news. The Verge reports: This update includes new features for breaking news updates and long-standing conspiracy theories. YouTube is implementing a change it announced in March, annotating conspiracy-related pages with text from "trusted sources like Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica." And in the hours after a major news event, YouTube will supplement search results with links to news articles, reasoning that rigorous outlets often publish text before producing video.

YouTube is also funding a number of partnerships. It's establishing a working group that will provide input on how it handles news, and it's providing money for "sustainable" video operations across 20 markets across the world, in addition to expanding an internal support team for publishers.

Comments

Why?

[LynnwoodRooster]

Sometimes it's fun to watch tinfoil-hat videos... But if you ARE going to try to be "authoritative", please do NOT use fresh news articles, especially about anything political, racial, or climate-based. Many of those have "corrections" issued a few days later, meaning that they were NOT in fact, authoritative. Better to just let it go as-is, and stop trying to hand-hold the viewer. Let people learn when they screw up, and learn the lesson that sometimes you need to check the facts that you hear, and also look at the other side as well to see if it has a better position backed with facts and logic.

Re:Why?

[Moryath]

You haven't been around humanity much if you think that people are currently learning when they screw up. Or what's your explanation for the number of inbred tinfoil-hatters who believe sites like Infowars?

Re:Why?

[Mashiki]

Good point. After all there's plenty of inbred tinfoil-hatters that believe sites like media matters, shareblue, and so on too.

Re:Why?

[Moryath]

If you are trying to compare Media Matters, which is primarily a fact-checking and informational review site, to a conspiracy peddler site like Infowars... well, you're part of the problem. False equivalence ploys by white supremacist conservatives are a common and well observed tactic.

Re:Why?

[TigerPlish]

Sometimes it's fun to watch tinfoil-hat videos...

Why? I'll use moon landings as an example. We went there, and we left tons of trash which are proof enough.. never mind the tons of film footage, photographs, experiments

Apollo, Gemini and Mercury made so many jobs for so many, directly and indirectly.

It was America's apogee, and after that it's been one long backslide. The moon deniers spit in the face of all that work. And if it's *that* easy to twist the denier's minds, what with all the hard evidence, then how easy is it to twist their minds on subjects with no evidence?

It's fun at first, then it's just sad. And the weak-minded are an exploitable things... food for thought.

Re:Why?

[penandpaper]

Yea, what could possibly go wrong.

Re:Why?

[cascadingstylesheet]

Our last election, and even current reporting, showed that a lot of people do not learn, and even the ones that do end up learning too late.

Are you serious?

You didn't like the results of the last presidential election, so that means that video sites need to festoon any unapproved opinions and information with warnings and links to goodthink?

Re:Why?

[Mashiki]

You mean bog him down as a troll tactic?

Skim their post history, they don't believe it's a troll tactic. They simply believe that anyone who disagrees with the progressive agenda in any form are white nationalists. If you want to see the face of extremism, it's right there. And that, is just plain sad.

Re:Why?

[Moryath]

Let me get this straight. An article about a monetary donation to a fact checking site and two opinion articles, and you're too media illiterate to check the bylines?

I'd laugh if it weren't so sad.

Please!

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you also eliminate fails videos and the 'you won't believe this trick' shit? Who the fuck is making all of these fake videos?

Frankly, it would be great is Youtube scrapped the recommendations all together. They suck balls.

This isn't going to help the way they want it to

[H3lldr0p]

The problem is that you have to have trust in the authoritative sources and the first thing the vast majority of the conspiracy peddlars do is to throw massive amounts of doubt upon said sources. This quickly devolves into a one side versus the other argument that authoritative sources almost never win.

It comes down to how you cannot reason someone out of a idea they didn't arrive at through reason in the first place.

Re:This isn't going to help the way they want it t

[swillden]

This quickly devolves into a one side versus the other argument that authoritative sources almost never win.

Depends on what you mean by "win". If by "win" you mean that the conspiracy theorists are convinced of the error of their ways, yeah, that's not going to happen. But if you mean that you'll prevent a significant number of visitors who would otherwise get sucked into the weirdness from getting sucked in, that seems much more feasible.

Supposed to cite sources in Wikipedia

[raymorris]

Aside from that, Wikipedia authors are supposed to cite reliable sources in the articles. Why? Because Wikipedia itself isn't a reliable source, it's only roughly as reliable as the sources it cites (or doesn't).

That said, on most topics it ends up being pretty good.