YouTube announced its updating its policies on deceptive videos and other content created to interfere with the upcoming election.
The Democrats and Republicans are getting ready for their national conventions soon. With these two events and the election coming very soon, there is a lot of talk and worry that platforms like Facebook and YouTube will interfere with the election. Being the world’s largest video platform with more than 2 billion users a month, YouTube will now ban videos containing information obtained through hacking. The platform wants to prevent this information from being used to meddle with elections or censuses. This policy update follows Google’s policy update about banning ads containing hacked information. Google will start enforcing that policy on September 1st.
YouTube will also take down videos encouraging interference
Also, YouTube said it would take down videos that encourage people to interfere with voting and other democratic processes, so if there’s a video encouraging people to create long lines at polling places to make the voting process harder. Those kinds of videos will not be allowed.
Additionally, YouTube has tried to secure its platform from foreign actors. Just last week, the platform said it banned almost 2,600 channels linked to China. These channels were part of investigations into “coordinated influence operations” on the site. YouTube also took down many channels that were linked to Russia and Iran.
More information behind political advertisements
Google says that it plans to give people more information on who is behind political advertisements on Google and YouTube. Also, Google’s political ad transparency report will include new ways to sort out campaign spending.