YouTube: More than 1 million videos promoting disinformation about COVID-19 are removed

YouTube reported through a statement on its official website that, from February 2020 to the present, approximately one million videos have been permanently removed from the platform for promoting false content about the COVID-19 virus that lurks to the world for a year. This is part of its strategy to fight misinformation, which involves removing or suspending a total of 10 million YouTube videos every three months.

The representative who signed the digital document where these details were provided is YouTube Product Manager Neal Mahon, who stated that this malicious content “only represents a minimal percentage of the billions of videos on YouTube. More or less, between 16% and 18% of the general total of views turn out to be content that violates the policies of the social network. Most do not even reach 10 views”.

However, considering that, as he mentioned, YouTube’s web and mobile platform currently has 2.1 billion users, even a relatively small percentage actually translates to a powerful niche.

Facebook also joins the fight against fake content about COVID-19
Let us remember that the act of eliminating a large sum of digital content uploaded to social networks that do not meet the necessary requirements to be considered safe is not new. A few days ago, Facebook also informed the public of a similar incident, when it removed a total of 31.5 million posts from its platform for promoting hate speech.

According to representatives of the social network, the reason was very similar to YouTube: it is part of the fight that these multimillion dollar companies are waging against the increasingly growing threat of false or misinformed content. The steps taken by both companies are significant when taking into account that both have more than 1 billion active users who consume, produce and share all kinds of multimedia content.