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YouTube, the Google-owned video site, has announced a series of new measures to clamp down on hoax videos. With me to discuss them is Anna Nicolaou, US media and marketing correspondent. Anna, first of all, can you explain what problem YouTube is trying to fix?
500 hours of video every minute is uploaded to YouTube, right? So it's a big task to figure out what should be there and what should not. And until recently, they've really tried to take a step back and not get involved in that. And now it seems that in light of the past few years, with the elections and this crackdown on fake news and misinformation, YouTube, Google, Facebook - they've all been pressured into having a look at what's actually floating around on their websites.
So what's the specific set of proposals we're hearing from YouTube now to try and fix this?
So for YouTube, it's a bit different than Facebook or Twitter, because it's all video, right? So what's been a problem for them is particularly when there's a breaking news event, they said it's difficult for legitimate news companies to put up videos in the few minutes after. Say there's a school shooting in the US, right?
You're not going to have an immediate video about that usually, but text is often quite faster, right? You'll have a quick blurb on Reuters. So they're experimenting with putting in text blurbs into the site next to videos.
Another thing they're doing is, in terms of these traditional conspiracy hoaxes, putting in text from, say, Wikipedia presenting the facts, is what they're saying, alongside all of these other videos.
So they're trying to steer people to more authoritative content.
Exactly.
Should we trust YouTube or its algorithms to decide what is authoritative?
That's the open question right now. How does one define that? That's quite difficult. Some people would say Breitbart is authoritative, right? And then they get criticised for censorship if they take those down.
So that's something that YouTube and all these companies are really struggling with. I don't think people really trust them right now to be the gatekeeper of what is true and what is false. So that's going to be, probably, I would say, the biggest challenge for these efforts - is sorting through and having some kind of unbiased decision-making mechanism.
Right. So finally, is YouTube doing this out of the goodness of its own hearts, or because if it doesn't do something on this, there's real risk involved?
There's clearly a large business incentive here to clean up the site. Google does not break out YouTube's revenues, but it's estimated to be at least $15bn a year, which is quite a sizable chunk for Google. So I would say - I mean, there's a lot of political pressure. There's public pressure, given the general public is much more aware of these things than they were, maybe, three years ago. And there's also, obviously, a commercial incentive.
All right, Anna, thank you very much.
Thank you.
