YouTube cracks down on false cancer claims as part of updates to medical misinformation policy

Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube is updating its medical misinformation policies, taking particular aim at false cancer treatments deemed harmful or ineffective by global health authorities, as well as content that discourages viewers from seeking medical treatment. In a blog post on Tuesday, the video sharing platform announced it will streamline dozens of its existing medical misinformation guidelines into three categories of prevention, treatment, and denial misinformation, as a way to “simplify approach for creators, viewers, and partners.” “While specific medical guidance can change over time as we learn more, our goal is to ensure that when it comes to areas of well-studied scientific consensus, YouTube is not a platform for distributing information that could harm people,” wrote blog authors Dr. Garth Graham, director and global head of healthcare and public health partnerships and Matt Halprin, VP and global head of trust and safety. Moving forward, the platform will remove content that “contradicts health authority guidance” on the prevention, transmission, and treatment of specific health conditions. Claims like “garlic cures cancer,” or “take vitamin C instead of radiation therapy,” were listed as examples of videos that would be taken down. Content that disputes the existence of specific health conditions will also be removed. For example, videos that deny people have died from COVID-19, the company wrote. YouTube repeated its stance on vaccine misinformation, last updated in 2021, noting that false claims on the safety, efficacy, and ingredients of approved vaccines fall under the prevention misinformation category and remain prohibited. Content subject to these policies will be evaluated based on if it is associated with a high public health risk, there is publicly available guidance from health authorities, and if it is a topic prone to misinformation. Exceptions include content that provides educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic context, according to YouTube’s guidelines. Like countervailing views from medical experts, satire, discussing specific results of a medical study, sharing one’s personal experiences, or showing a public hearing. “It's positive to see companies regularly iterating on these policies, being open to change, being open to trying things and seeing what the consequences of a given approach are,” said Matt Hatfield, Campaigns Director for advocacy group OpenMedia. However, online platforms like YouTube should not be fully responsible for evaluating the results of those efforts, he continued, calling for “legislated transparency” on how content moderation policies are being enforced. “Right now it's primarily platforms who have access to that data and they do run studies, but they may or may not report on them and they have a real incentive to not look at certain problems.” He referred to the Wall Street Journal’s 2021 investigation into Meta Platforms Inc. After whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked documents revealing the social media company exempted high-profile users from enforcement of its rules, company researchers were aware that Instagram was harmful to teenage girls, and that it had a weak response to known instances of online hate, misinformation, and drug and sex trafficking. “We're so in the dark about a lot of how this works on platforms currently,” Hatfield stated, “platforms don’t want us to have that clear view it’s not in their commercial interest.” “We want to see every platform document their process for reaching their policies and how those policies are administered, as publicly as possible,” as well as independent study of the results, said the campaigner. Something he said could come out of the Canadian Heritage Minister’s pending online harms bill, which the government has been slow to move on since stakeholder discussions concluded last November. The proposed framework of the bill was released in April 2022, but after a series of expert advisory group workshops and roundtable discussions, the government has remained tight-lipped about any changes they might have made. Hatfield stated that the direction of the initial proposal was very concerning to OpenMedia, saying it would be “completely disastrous to put into effect.” Instead, the lobby group’s ideal version of the bill would steer away from punishing and holding companies responsible for everything that goes wrong on their platforms and more towards a duty of care model. “The good version is if they are saying platforms need to make a reasonable effort to do a risk assessment of the risks posed by their particular platform model and to have policies and systems in place to mitigate some of those risks,” said Hatfield. “One of our biggest concerns with this legislation is platforms mitigating their legal risk by removing way more content than is legally necessary,” he continued, “and a bad version of online harms would create that situation.” Hatfield further encouraged the department to release the new version of the proposal for another round of consultation. – Reporting by Phalen Tynes-MacDonald at pcreed@thewirereport.ca and editing by Jenna Cocullo at jcocullo@thewirereport.ca.

YouTube cracks down on false cancer claims as part of updates to medical misinformation policy

News | August 17, 2023

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