YouTube will stop removing content that falsely claims that the 2020 election or other US presidential elections in the past have been marred by widespread fraud, error or glitches.

has

announced

Friday

.

The change is a sea change for Google’s video service, which said a month after the 2020 election it would begin removing new posts falsely claiming widespread voter fraud or error had changed the outcome.

YouTube reports this in a blog post

Friday

that the updated policy was an attempt to protect the ability to openly debate political ideas, even those that are controversial or based on disproved assumptions.

In the current environment, we find that while removing this content curbs some misinformation, it may also have the unintended effect of curtailing political expression without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real harm, the blog post said.

The updated policy, effective immediately, will not stop YouTube from removing content that attempts to mislead voters in the upcoming 2024 election or other future races in the US and abroad. The company said its other existing rules against misleading election information remain unchanged.

This could be difficult to enforce, said John Wihbey, an associate professor at Northeastern University who studies social media and disinformation.

It doesn’t take a genius when you’re sitting on the disinformation that’s wronged us in 2020 to say, ‘hold on, let’s just argue that voting is generally not worth it. And 2020 is our example, he said. I don’t know how you untangle rhetoric that refers to past mistakes as well as future possibilities. The content moderation team, which is going to try this, is going to tie themselves in knots to find out exactly where that line is.

The announcement comes after Meta-owned YouTube and other major social media companies, including Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, have come under fire in recent years for not doing more to stem the fire hose of misleading election information and disinformation spreading. spreading on their platforms.

Left-wing media watchdog group Media Matters said the policy change comes as no surprise given it was one of the last major social media platforms to enforce the policy.

YouTube and the other platforms that preceded it in watering down their policies on misleading election information, such as Facebook, have made it clear that one attempted revolt was not enough. They set the stage for an encore,” Vice President Julie Millican said in a statement.