YOUTUBE to Promote and Fund 'Authoritative News'...
YOUTUBE DEBUTS PLAN TO PROMOTE AND FUND 'AUTHORITATIVE'
NEWS
The video platform is less focused on getting rid of
conspiracy theorists than on trying to elevate journalism it considers
valuable.
By ISSIE LAPOWSKY 07.09.1805:07 PM
FOLLOWING A YEAR in which YouTube has repeatedly promoted
conspiracy-theory videos during breaking news events like the shootings in
Parkland, Florida, and Las Vegas, the company announced on Monday a slew of new
features it hopes will make news on the platform more reliable and less
susceptible to manipulation. The company is also investing $25 million in
grants to news organizations looking to expand their video operations, as part
of a larger, $300 million program sponsored by YouTube's sister company,
Google.
According to YouTube executives, the goal is to identify
authoritative news sources, bring those videos to the top of users' feeds, and
support quality journalism with tools and funding that will help news
organizations more effectively reach their audiences. The challenge is deciding
what constitutes authority when the public seems more divided than ever on
which news sources to trust—or whether to trust the traditional news industry
at all.
Among the many changes YouTube announced Monday are
substantive tweaks to the tools it uses to recommend news-related videos. In
the coming weeks, YouTube will start to display an information panel above
videos about developing stories, which will include a link to an article that
Google News deems to be most relevant and authoritative on the subject. The
move is meant to help prevent hastily recorded hoax videos from rising to the
top of YouTube’s recommendations. And yet, Google News hardly has a spotless
record when it comes to promoting authoritative content. Following the 2016
election, the tool surfaced a Wordpress blog falsely claiming Donald Trump won
the popular vote as one of the top results for the term “final election
results.”
YouTube is also expanding a feature, currently available
in 17 countries, that shows up on the homepage during breaking news events.
This section of the homepage will only surface videos from sources YouTube
considers authoritative. The same goes for the videos that YouTube recommends
viewers watch next.
These changes attempt to address the problem of
misinformation online without adding more human moderators. With some 450 hours
of video going up on YouTube every minute, “human curation isn’t really a viable
solution,” Neal Mohan, YouTube's chief product officer, told reporters Monday.
Traditionally, YouTube's algorithm has prioritized a
user's personal viewing history, as well as the context of the video that user
is currently watching, when deciding what videos to surface next. That can be
problematic because, as researchers have found, once you watch one
conspiracy-theory video claiming that the student survivors of the Parkland
shooting are crisis actors, YouTube may recommend you watch even more. With
this change, the company is trying to interrupt that downward spiral. It's
important to note, though, that YouTube is applying that standard only to
breaking news and developing stories. For all other videos that users find on
YouTube, the recommendation engine will work the old-fashioned way, which,
YouTube executives acknowledge, may well turn up content that people find
objectionable.
"There are going to be counter points of view, and
there’s going to be [videos] where people who have a conspiratorial opinion are
going to express them," Mohan says. "What I think we can do is,
instead of telling users what to think, give them as much information as
possible, so that they can make those decisions themselves."
To that end, YouTube is also beginning to implement its
previously announced partnerships with Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Brittanica,
which it will use to fact-check more evergreen conspiracy theories about, say,
the moon landing or the Bermuda Triangle. Those videos will now feature an
information panel with context from either Encyclopedia Brittanica or
Wikipedia. For the moment, though, these panels are being applied only to a
small subset of videos that, Mohan says, "tend to be accompanied by
misinformation,” meaning they’re hardly a cure-all for the vast quantities of
new and less predictable misinformation being uploaded to YouTube every day.
Eradicating that content isn’t the goal for YouTube,
anyway. After all, merely spreading falsehoods isn’t against the platform’s
policies, unless those falsehoods are considered to be hate speech or
harassment. That’s one reason why known propagandists like Alex Jones of
Infowars have managed to build wildly successful channels on the back of
conspiracy theories that carefully adhere to YouTube’s terms. As it walks the
fine line between openness, profitability, and living up to its responsibility
to the public, YouTube is less focused on getting rid of the hoaxers than it is
on trying to elevate journalism it considers valuable.
That’s one reason it’s giving $25 million in grants to
newsrooms that are investing in online video capabilities. That’s a small
amount for the multibillion-dollar company, but YouTube’s executives say it
could grow in time. The funding is part of the so-called Google News Initiative,
a three-year, $300 million fund aimed at strengthening and lifting up quality
journalism, which Google announced in March. The hope is that this funding can
help news organizations build more robust video operations to compete with the
amateurs who might like to mislead their audiences. YouTube has also formed a
working group of newsrooms that will help the company develop new products for
journalists. “We’re doing this because, while we see the news industry
changing, the importance of news is not,” says Robert Kyncl, YouTube’s chief
business officer.
Still, questions remain about how this experiment will
play out in practice. Identifying which news outlets are authoritative is hard
enough in the United States, where people can subsist on completely different
media diets according to their politics. Among the news organizations that
YouTube highlighted in the announcement as authoritative were CNN and Fox News;
the former is routinely rejected by President Trump as “fake news,” the latter
is among the least trusted news sources among Democratic voters. This
bifurcation of the media poses a challenge for all tech platforms, not just
YouTube, that resist taking a stand on what constitutes truth. In attempting to
satisfy people all across the political spectrum—and do it on a global
scale—they risk landing themselves smack in the center of the same ideological
battles they helped foment.
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