YouTube announced on Friday that it will no longer remove election lies from its platform as a former President. Donald Trump and MAGA loyalists continue to deny the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
In a statement released on the company’s official blog, one of the world’s largest video platforms cited “the ability to openly debate political ideas, even controversial ones. or based on unproven assumptions,” was the reason for the change. A 2020 Pew Research study found that a quarter of American adults get their news from the platform.
“Two years, tens of thousands of videos removed, and an election cycle later, we feel it’s time to reassess the impact of this policy in today’s changing landscape,” Google-owned YouTube said.
“With that in mind, and with the 2024 campaigns running smoothly, we will stop removing content that makes false claims that widespread fraud, error or malfunction occurred during the election. 2020 US Presidential election and other previous elections.”
In its statement, the company clarified that it will continue to remove content that misleads voters about the voting process.
YouTube announced the policy in December 2020, less than a month before the attack on the US Capitol on January 6. A study from independent research group Transparency.tube found that videos selling election lies got more than 137 million views during election week. Those videos often spread to other social media platforms, including about a third of all election-related videos posted to Twitter in November 2020. But after YouTube introduced the policy, the volume voter fraud videos shared on social media have decreased, New York Times report.
In a statement responding to the change, Julie Millican, vice president of liberal watchdog Media Matters for America, noted that Youtube was “one of the last major social media platforms to implement a policy of trying to curb misinformation about the 2016 election.” 2020.” Twitter has stopped suspending, banning or checking the authenticity of users who spread lies during the March 2021 election, while Facebook has reduced efforts to prevent the spread of misinformation ahead of the election. midterm elections in 2022. This March, YouTube reinstated Trump’s account, following the lead of Meta and Twitter.
YouTube “now lets people say whatever they want about the 2020 election,” far-right Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert tweeted on Saturday, reply to the news. “Looks like even YouTube is getting ready for people to start telling the TRUTH again.”
