YouTube has removed more than 30,000 misleading Covid-19 vaccination videos in the past five months, it said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A YouTube spokeswoman said the videos contradicted vaccine information from the World Health Organization (WHO) or health authorities such as the NHS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In October, it banned vaccine misinformation in a bid to clamp down on attempts to discredit the jabs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It added that in the past year, it had removed more than 800,000 videos for coronavirus misinformation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That figure covers more than just vaccines, but wider “medically unsubstantiated” claims about the virus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We showed volunteers an anti-vax video. How did they react?
YouTube bans misleading Covid-19 vaccine videos
It includes false claims that the vaccine kills people, causes infertility, or contains a secret microchip that will be implanted into recipients.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the early stages of the pandemic, YouTube was home to many conspiracy theories about the disease and even false claims of non-existent “cures”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Despite its ban on such content, finding and deleting it remains a struggle for YouTube and other social platforms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A universal criticism of social media sites throughout the pandemic has been the slow speed at which they have acted over harmful disinformation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In recent months, attention has turned to how much they have allowed falsehoods about the vaccine to proliferate on their platforms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
YouTube has generally been ahead of the curve when it comes to introducing policies to tackle this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But I have investigated the impact of anti-vaccine content online for a number of months, and there is no doubt that it had already scared people off the jab long before this announcement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To make matters worse, the minority of committed activists who spread harmful anti-vaccine content online are using increasingly sophisticated tactics that pose problems for a video platform such as YouTube.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My recent investigation for BBC Panorama revealed how videos featuring people who brandish medical credentials to promote false vaccine claims are very effective at playing on pre-existing concerns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These kinds of videos have thrived on platforms such as YouTube – and a number of the main culprits still use YouTube to cultivate an audience of hundreds of thousands of subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
YouTube has removed more than 30,000 misleading Covid-19 vaccination videos in the past five months, it said. A YouTube spokeswoman said the videos contradicted vaccine information from the World Health Organization (WHO) or health authorities such as the NHS. In October, it banned vaccine misinformation in a bid to clamp down on attempts to discredit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n