YOUTUBE ANNOUNCES CRACKDOWN ON QANON
Joins movement to curb baseless conspiracy theories
OAKLAND
a crackdown on QAnon, though it did not ban its supporters from its platform. It did ban thousands of accounts associated with QAnon content and blocked URLs associated with it from being shared. Twitter also said that it would stop highlighting and recommending tweets associated with QAnon.
Facebook, meanwhile, announced last week that it was banning groups that openly support QAnon. It said it would remove pages, groups and Instagram accounts for representing QAnon — even if they don’t promote violence.
The social network said it will consider a variety of factors in deciding whether a group meets its criteria for a ban. Those include the group’s name, its biography or “about” section, and discussions within the page or group on Facebook, or account on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.
Facebook’s move came two months after it announced softer crackdown, saying said it would stop promoting the group and its adherents. But that effort faltered due to spotty enforcement.
YouTube said it had already removed tens of thousands of QAnon-videos and eliminated hundreds of channels under its existing policies — especially those that explicitly threaten violence or deny the existence of major violent events.
“All of this work has been pivotal in curbing the reach of harmful conspiracies, but there’s even more we can do to address certain conspiracy theories that are used to justify real-world violence, like QAnon,” the company said in Thursday’s blog post.
YouTube’s action comes on the heels of Facebook and Twitter moving quickly this week to limit the spread of an unverified political story published by the conservativeleaning New York Post.
The move led to predictable cries of censorship from the right. But it also illustrated the slippery hold even the largest tech companies have on the flow of information, particularly in the midst of a raucous presidential election campaign.
While Facebook and Twitter have often been slow to combat apparent misinformation and other violations of their rules, their response in this case shows how quickly they can move when they want to. Misinformation frequently outpaces the truth on social networks, academic studies have found. But if social media titans aren’t careful, their attempts to clamp down on a story can amplify it further. And even when they exercise caution, they risk generating their own headlines with every move.
For the first time in recent memory, the two social media platforms enforced rules against misinformation on a story from a mainstream media publication. The story in question, which has not been confirmed by other publications, cited unverified emails from Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son that were reportedly discovered by President Donald Trump’s allies.
Trump’s campaign seized on the report, although it raised more questions than answers, including whether emails at the center of the story were hacked or fabricated.