YouTube is a platform with a broad range of themes and subjects, from entertainment content to educational material. However, one genre of video that has always been prevalent there is conspiracy theories, defending absurd ideas such as a flat Earth or the claim that the moon landing was a hoax, ultimately alienating a massive number of people. To contain this, YouTube announced in a post on its blog that its algorithms would be changed to prevent conspiratorial videos from being promoted and recommended by the site.
The announcement said: "This change relies on a combination of machine learning and real people. We work with human evaluators and experts throughout the United States to help train the machine-learning systems that generate recommendations. These evaluators are trained using public guidelines and will provide a fundamental perspective on a video’s quality."
It was also mentioned that this would affect less than one percent of the entire platform, but considering YouTube’s size, that already amounts to millions of videos. However, this does not necessarily mean that videos of this kind will be banned from the site; they will simply stop being shown on the home page and in the recommended tab. "To be clear, this will affect only video recommendations that appear in the related tab, not whether a video will be available on YouTube. We believe this change strikes a balance between maintaining a platform that allows freedom of expression and fulfilling our responsibility to users."
These changes will be applied globally, but will begin in the United States. As a result, conspiracy videos will appear less and less in the “Trending” and “Recommendations” tabs.
