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?

[AmiMoJo]

TFA shows that with breaking news there is a little warning saying that details may change. A search for "moon landing" uses a snippet from Encyclopedia Britannica.

Seems like they have thought this one through. It's very conservative.

Re:Why?

[PhrostyMcByte]

Let people learn when they screw up

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. If Google can do something to flag obviously false reports as what they are, then I say more power to them -- it'll be doing us a service.

Even if they take things that are merely probably false or highly spun and supply a few links to what reputable sources say about the issue, that'd help keep people more informed and outside of their bubble.

I don't like having one company be an arbiter of truth either, but... if people can't do it for themselves, who is going to do it? Traditional news agencies have been unable to counter this round of nonsense, and in some cases are contributing to it.

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?

[Mashiki]

I love how you trot out a book by a white supremacist hack who beat the "benghazi whee" tinfoil hat nonsense to death and derailed her own career by making crap up repeatedly, as your "source".

I'm amused that you're continuing to double down on your racism and bigotry. If that source is so terrible, why don't you pick it up and dispute it. I'll wait. I'll give you say 110 pages in and pick whatever you want.

But hey, that stuff must sell in the trailer park.

Oh boy, tripling down on the bigotry. What a beautiful face of modern progressiveness.

Re:Why?

[PhrostyMcByte]

The person who won does not matter to my post. There is evidence showing that regardless of who you were voting for, you were being targeted. Some of it was more obvious than others, but people on all sides of the political spectrum -- me included -- failed to filter out some of the spin coming their way.

Stop jumping to conclusions with divisive outrage. It's what they wanted. There's no room for pride here.

Re:Why?

[GameboyRMH]

Exactly, and making perfect the enemy of good is just the tactic post-truth types love to use against fact-checking. Case in point: "Sometimes fresh news articles get corrected, therefore let's give batshit nutjobbery and Russian propaganda a head start (particularly on hot-button issues where I want to empower post-truth narratives) until things settle down."

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.

Fake News is an opportunistic virus

[king neckbeard]

The reason "fake news" can thrive is because MSM is so constantly horseshit that people correctly distrust it. The problem is that the replacements often have lower quality and reliability. The answer is to bludgeon MSM into shape. Ban CNN's account for a week when they post a bullshit story, and this will be resolved pretty quickly, because it's treating the cause. What Youtube is proposing here is treating the symptoms.

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.

Who watches the watchmen?

[Texmaize]

The reason this is bad because currently the "authoritative" sources are actually incredibly biased, manufacture stories, and often hide information to further an agenda. They understand that if you control the narrative, you can manufacture a reality, or at least keep compliant people invested in such a narrative.

For example, you might yell tinfoil hate but here are a few off the top of my head:
Dan Rather, anchor long time CBS anchor, forced to resign in disgrace for manufacturing anti-conservative news http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBI...
Funny if you read the NY times and other articles attempting to pretend this was a normal stepping down

Brian Williams, NBC making false claims https://www.bbc.com/news/world...

NPR admitting press is biased and making up stories https://nypost.com/2017/10/21/...

If i need, I can go on. The point being it is easy to paint others with pejoratives like "tin foil hat" while failing to even consider much that you believe is likely from tainted perspective. Many people rightly fear that google (aka youtube) are censoring opinions that poke holes in their world view. Fake-news is more about people who disagree, not with people posting things that are untrue.