YouTube is following the lead of Twitter and Facebook, saying that it is taking more steps to limit QAnon and other baseless conspiracy theories that can lead to real-world violence.

The Google-owned video platform said Thursday it will now prohibit material targeting a person or group with conspiracy theories that have been used to justify violence.

One example would be videos that threaten or harass someone by suggesting they are complicit in a conspiracy such as QAnon, which paints President Donald Trump as a secret warrior against a supposed child-trafficking ring run by celebrities and “deep state” government officials.

Pizzagate is another internet conspiracy theory — essentially a predecessor to QAnon — that would fall in the banned category. Its promoters claimed children were being harmed at a pizza restaurant in Washington. D.C. A man who believed in the conspiracy entered the restaurant in December 2016 and fired an assault rifle. He was sentenced to prison in 2017.

YouTube is the third of the major social platforms to announce policies intended to rein in QAnon, a conspiracy theory they all helped spread.

Twitter announced in July a crackdown on QAnon, though it did not ban its supporters from its platform. It did ban thousands of accounts associated with QAnon content and blocked URLs associated with it from being shared. Twitter also said that it would stop highlighting and recommending tweets associated with QAnon.

Facebook, meanwhile, announced last week that it was banning groups that openly support QAnon. It said it would remove pages, groups and Instagram accounts for representing QAnon — even if they don’t promote violence.

The social network said it will consider a variety of factors in deciding whether a group meets its criteria for a ban. Those include the group’s name, its biography or “about” section, and discussions within the page or group on Facebook, or an account on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.

YouTube said it had already removed tens of thousands of QAnon-videos and eliminated hundreds of channels under its existing policies — especially those that explicitly threaten violence or deny the existence of major violent events.

“All of this work has been pivotal in curbing the reach of harmful conspiracies, but there’s, even more, we can do to address certain conspiracy theories that are used to justify real-world violence, like QAnon,” the company said in Thursday’s blog post.

Experts said the move shows that YouTube is taking threats around violent conspiracy theories seriously and recognizes the importance of limiting the spread of such conspiracies. But, with QAnon increasingly creeping into mainstream politics and U.S. life, they wonder if it is too late.

“While this is an important change, for almost three years YouTube was a primary site for the spread of QAnon,” said Sophie Bjork-James, an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University who studies QAnon. “Without the platform Q would likely remain an obscure conspiracy. For years YouTube provided this radical group an international audience.”

Source:apnews

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A report in AP states that twitter has taken the unprecedented step of adding fact-check warnings to two of President Donald Trump’s tweets that falsely called mail-in ballots “substantially fraudulent” and predicted a “Rigged Election.” On Wednesday, the president threatened to impose new regulations on social media companies or even to “close them down.”

But Twitter’s move and Trump’s reaction raise a host of questions, including why Twitter acted now, how it decides when to use such warnings and what its newly assumed role means for the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

QUESTION: Twitter has resisted taking action on Trump’s tweets for years, despite the president’s history of spreading misinformation and abuse on the platform. What changed?

ANSWER: Trump has pushed Twitter’s boundaries for years, using it to attack rivals, speak to his base and simply vent. Until Tuesday, he had never faced sanctions — though other world leaders had.

But things started to change earlier this year when coronavirus misinformation began to spread. Twitter began flagging tweets that spread disputed or misleading claims about the virus with “get the facts” links to more information, including news stories and fact checks.

Twitter said it would be adding such warnings to other tweets that could confuse users. Tweets deemed “harmful” would be removed altogether. Trump’s vote-by-mail tweets were the first non-pandemic ones Twitter flagged this way.

Those tweets met specific Twitter criteria for misinformation on certain topics, including the coronavirus, how to vote in elections and the census. There is no such policy for other topics. Earlier Trump tweets about Joe Scarborough, which baselessly suggested the television host and former GOP congressman had committed murder 20 years ago, didn’t fall into a specific misinformation category, which is likely why they remain untouched.

Twitter’s action is “indicative the public outcry reached such a fever pitch that the company feels like it has to take action,” said Jennifer Grygiel, a communications professor at Syracuse University who uses they/them pronouns. It’s a “sign that Twitter fears public opinion more than the president who cries wolf too often,” they added.

QUESTION: Could Trump make good on his threats to regulate or even shut down social media companies? Could Congress or the Federal Communications Commission help him do this?

ANSWER: It’s highly unlikely.

Jack Balkin, a Yale University law professor and First Amendment expert, said any attempt to regulate social media companies for the content on their site would likely need congressional input and approval — and would almost certainly face strong legal challenges. The FCC, meanwhile, has no jurisdiction over internet companies like Twitter.

What is clear, Balkin said, is the limit on Trump’s authority to impose his own rules. While the president could ask for an investigation or issue some type of executive order, he can’t override laws written by Congress and rooted in the constitution. But that’s not the point, he said.

“This is an attempt by the president to, as we used to say in basketball, work the refs,” Balkin said. “He’s threatening and cajoling with the idea that these folks in their corporate board rooms will think twice about what they’re doing.”

Former federal judge Michael McConnell, who now directs Stanford Law School’s Constitutional Law Center, also said Trump lacks the legal power to back up his threat. “He has no such authority,” he said in an email. “He is just venting.”

QUESTION: Trump posted the same claim about mail-in ballots on Facebook Tuesday, but the company has taken no action. Does Twitter’s decision raise the stakes for other social media companies?

ANSWER: Not for Facebook, it doesn’t.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that tech platforms shouldn’t be in the business of separating fact from fiction on their platforms.

“We have a different policy, I think, than Twitter on this, I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online,” Zuckerberg said in a Fox News interview that aired Wednesday. “In general, private companies — especially these platform companies — shouldn’t be in the position of doing that.”

Facebook has long resisted directly fact-checking politicians, including the ads they run on its site. The company has a policy against voter interference that includes misrepresenting “the dates, locations, times and methods for voting” among other things, but it hasn’t applied these rules to Trump’s post.

And Facebook, which works with news outlets including The Associated Press to fact check claims on its site, does not allow fact checks to be directly attached to Facebook posts by Trump or other politicians.

However, Facebook and Twitter share similar policies around voting misinformation, including bans around posts that mislead about how or where to vote. Also, Facebook reduces the circulation of social media posts if they are rated false by any of the dozens of news outlets it partners with to fact check claims on its site.

QUESTION: How does Twitter decide which tweets get flagged with the warnings? What happens to the tweets?

ANSWER: Trump’s tweets got flagged after someone reported them. That could happen to anyone, but Twitter emphasizes that it can’t police every tweet. The company does make its own decision on the matter, unlike Facebook, which outsources such work to outside fact-checkers.

Tweets flagged this way are not demoted, hidden or “silenced” in any way, Twitter said.

Lisa Fazio, a psychology professor and misinformation expert at Vanderbilt University, said the fact-check link is “problematic” because it doesn’t directly dispute false information in the tweets. On its own, she said, “‘get the facts’ could mean the president is right, and here’s the evidence. The refutation is pretty weak.”

QUESTION: What does this mean for the 2020 U.S. presidential election?

ANSWER: Twitter says users can expect to see more such flags thrown on misleading tweets about voting.

Whether or not Twitter sticks with the practice depends on how much pressure the public and the media keep up, Grygiel said. It’s also not clear how effective it will be.

“Some research shown labeling can make some people dig in more and resist it,” Grygiel said.

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Facebook and Microsoft's grievances over how their gaming apps appear on Apple's App Store may feed into an EU investigation into the iPhone maker's business as EU antitrust regulators said such concerns are on their radar.

The European Commission in June opened four probes into Apple, three of which are into its App Store and its restrictive rules, including requirements that app developers use its own in-app purchasing system.

US social media giant Facebook and Microsoft are the latest companies to voice concerns about the rules, which have drawn criticism from app developers who say they create an uneven playing field to compete with the iPhone maker.

Asked about Facebook and Microsoft's issues with Apple, Commission spokeswoman Arianna Podesta said in a statement: "The Commission is aware of these concerns regarding Apple's App Store rules."

She did not provide details.

Apple dismissed criticism of its App Store rules, saying that all apps are reviewed against the same set of guidelines whose aim is to protect customers and provide a fair and level playing field for developers.

Facebook last week said its gaming app was only available on Apple's App Store as a streaming service and that users will not be able to play games.

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said the company had to remove gameplay functionality entirely to secure Apple's approval of its Facebook Gaming app.

Microsoft, which has a game-streaming service called Project xCloud said: "Apple stands alone as the only general-purpose platform to deny consumers from cloud gaming and game subscription services like Xbox Game Pass."

"It consistently treats gaming apps differently, applying more lenient rules to non-gaming apps even when they include interactive content," it added in an emailed statement.

Source: Reuters

 

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Alphabet Inc’s YouTube is rolling out its version of social media rival TikTok, a new short-form video service called Shorts, enabled within its video-sharing platform.

YouTube will first test the feature in India over the next few days and then expand to more countries in the coming months, it said in a blog post on Monday. 

YouTube’s new product, which will compete with Facebook Inc’s Reels and TikTok, will let users record short mobile-friendly vertical videos and then add special effects and soundtracks pulled from a music library.

The announcement also comes as Oracle Corp and China’s ByteDance team up to keep TikTok operating in the United States, beating Microsoft Corp in a deal structured as a partnership rather than an outright sale.

YouTube’s entry into the short-form video service space coincides with TikTok’s ban in one of its biggest market, India, following the country’s escalating tensions with China.

Source: Reuter

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