Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s YouTube account is seen on a cell phone and laptop computer pc after being restored by Google and its father or mother firm Alphabet Inc, as Google lifted a greater than two-year suspension imposed on Trump after the lethal January 6, 2021 Capitol Hill riot, in Washington, March 17, 2023.
Jim Bourg | Reuters
Google-owned YouTube will stop removing false claims of widespread election fraud within the 2020 presidential race, the video platform introduced on Friday.
YouTube stated in a blog post that it made the choice to stability its twin objectives of “defending our group and offering a house for open dialogue and debate.” The choice, which comes forward of the 2024 midterm races, undoes a coverage applied in December 2020, after President Joe Biden gained the election.
“Two years, tens of hundreds of video removals, and one election cycle later, we acknowledged it was time to reevaluate the results of this coverage in as we speak’s modified panorama,” YouTube wrote. “In the present setting, we discover that whereas removing this content material does curb some misinformation, it may even have the unintended impact of curbing political speech with out meaningfully lowering the chance of violence or different real-world hurt.”
The new rule will go into impact on Friday, June 2.
In the 2020 elections, the corporate confronted backlash for delayed motion when it got here to labeling and removing movies that confirmed misinformation or that falsely claimed widespread voter fraud. After the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol, YouTube stated it will start suspending channels that make false claims about widespread voter fraud
As of March 2023, YouTube had already lifted restrictions positioned on Trump’s account following the Jan. 6 rebellion.
YouTube stated there are nonetheless elements of its election misinformation coverage that stay, together with highlighting authoritative sources in search and proposals and prohibiting posts that purpose to mislead voters on the place and the way to vote.
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