Video platform YouTube declared in a blogpost that it would take down any accounts and videos of prominent anti-vaccine activists from its platform, thus strengthening its policies on misinformation toward vaccines.
Taking action, YouTube banned the accounts of several vocal anti-vaccine activists including Joseph Mercola, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Erin Elizabeth, Sherri Tenpenny, and the Children’s Health Defense Fund, a company spokeswoman said.
With the newly adopted policy, Google-owned YouTube joined Facebook and Twitter who took similar measures earlier this year.
In February, Facebook announced it will remove posts and claims about vaccines, while Twitter came in March to introduce a new policy that relies on penalties for any misinformation shared about the coronavirus and vaccines.
“We’ve steadily seen false claims about the coronavirus vaccines spill over into misinformation about vaccines in general, and we’re now at a point where it’s more important than ever to expand the work we started with COVID-19 to other vaccines,” YouTube company said.
In the new guideline, YouTube will not strictly ban all videos that are vaccine-related but will allow personal testimonials and videos that speak of its policies, trials and historical successes or failures.
Thus, videos can still be posted on Youtube as long as they “don’t violate other Community Guidelines, or the channel doesn’t show a pattern of promoting vaccine hesitancy.”
“Today’s policy update is an important step to address vaccine and health misinformation on our platform, and we’ll continue to invest across the board” in policies that bring its users high-quality information, the company said in its announcement.
In the past year, YouTube removed more than 130,000 videos that violated its COVID-19 vaccine policies while promoting videos of experts and public health institutions instead. In October of the present year, YouTube initiated looking into broadening its policy on any content anti-vaccine related by strictly setting new rules.
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