Youtube Removes 1 M. Videos for COVID-19 Misinformation

Leading platform Youtube has removed more than a million videos containing misinformation linked to COVID-19, Sputnik reported on Thursday.

YouTube’s Chief Product Officer Neal Mahon said: "Misinformation has moved from the marginal to the mainstream,” adding, “No longer contained to the sealed-off worlds of Holocaust deniers or 9-11 truthers, it now stretches into every facet of society, sometimes tearing through communities with blistering speed.”

He continued after sharing new statistics related to the content of the platform, saying, “Bad content represents only a tiny percentage of the billions of videos on YouTube (about .16-.18% of total views turn out to be content that violates our policies)."

Youtube is considered the second giant social media platform that took a serious step to restrict all misinformation linked to the pandemic and the process of vaccination after Facebook.

Last week, Facebook removed thousands of pages that stream and post wrong information about COVID-19 vaccines, Reuters reported on Thursday.

This step came after the White House called social media platforms to control posts that linked to COVID-19, especially, those that hint misinformation about the vaccines and the process of the vaccination.

According to a newly issued report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), at least 12 accounts were shut down due to posting the majority of anti-vaccination misinformation online.

Although the social network denied the process of calculating the primary accounts that spread vaccine misinformation, the platform revealed that it removed dozens of pages, and groups on Facebook, and Instagram that linked to those 12 people for violating Facebook policies.