Google's YouTube video platform is switching gears in the lead-up to the 2024 election in order to rig the election against unapprov...
Google's YouTube video platform is switching gears in the lead-up to the 2024 election in order to rig the election against unapproved candidates.
In a new blog post, YouTube laid out how it is "voluntarily" assuming the role of a private business that "supports elections."
YouTube is not just interested in rigging the United States election, though; the changes arrived just prior to the European Parliament (EP) election, which is also right around the corner.
YouTube says its goal is to present "an overview of our efforts to help people across Europe and beyond find helpful and authoritative election news and information," meaning YouTube will disseminate only approved information for public consumption to sway people's voting habits.
"The overview is the usual hodgepodge of reasonable concepts, such as promoting information on how to vote or register for voting, learning about election results, etc., that quickly morph into yet another battle in the 'war on disinformation,'" warns Reclaim the Net about what YouTube is really up to.
"And what better way to 'support' an election (and by extension, democracy) – than to engage in another round of mass censorship? /s."
In 2023, YouTube removed 35,000 video uploads in EU
In the same above-linked blog post, YouTube also admits, and quite proudly, that it pulled down 35,000 videos that were uploaded in the European Union (EU) in 2023, with many more also coming down this year.
All of the videos purportedly contained information that violate the video platform's policies, including "certain types of election misinformation" – are there certain kinds of election misinformation that YouTube allows, we wonder?
It is not just artificial intelligence (AI) that is raking YouTube and pulling down "offensive" content, either. Reports indicate that YouTube has become a well-oiled machine "at scale" where "global teams of reviewers" search for videos to remove with the help of machine learning algorithms.
YouTube's excuse for behaving this way is that it simply wants to help it users "learn about the issues shaping the debate." In order to do that, one component of the effort involves "dealing with harmful content," which really means that YouTube is trying to shape the debate rather than simply facilitate it.
"Our Intelligence Desk has also been working for months to get ahead of emerging issues and trends that could affect the EU elections, both on and off YouTube," the blog post explains.
"This helps our enforcement teams to address these potential trends before they become larger issues."
Furthermore, under no circumstances will YouTube allow any kind of coordinated influence campaigns to occur on the platform from now on, "regardless of the political viewpoints they support." If Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) believes it has spotted such a campaign, it will immediately share the information with law enforcement, including EUROPOL.
While YouTube does admit that AI in general can potentially be used to destroy an election, its management insists that this type of AI is okay.
"When viewers search for 2024 European parliamentary candidates, an information panel will appear above the search results, highlighting candidate information, such as their political party, and link to Google Search," YouTube says. "Below the information panel, there may also be a link to the candidate's official channel."
"In the final weeks of the campaign, on the YouTube homepage, we'll show reminders on where and how to vote."
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