This past year I have made great strides in taking myself off of most social media platforms. My main reasoning for doing so primarily was to become more productive with my time, however a side effect I have discovered in doing so is it has filtered out a lot of the noise I was accustomed to viewing present on these platforms. In particular, a lot of the noise I’m referring to is the disinformation and misinformation that gets spread throughout these various channels. I discovered through implementing this change in my life that although misinformation is an inevitable part of being a media consumer, especially in the age of the internet, there are steps we can take to minimize the amount of misinformation we are presented with on a daily basis. In conjunction with this, there have been strategies these media companies have incorporated onto their platforms within recent years to combat the spread of misinformation. The goal of this blog post will be to highlight some of the specific implementations my most used social media platform (YouTube) has employed, the effectiveness of these methods, as well as any improvements that can be made.
As someone who has been present on YouTube since near-inception, I have witnessed the platform scale and evolve in numerous ways, particularly in regards to their community guidelines and content moderation policy changes that have been implemented throughout the years. One of the most turbulent eras I recall in this website’s history was when shifting their algorithm’s focus to “family-friendly” content, heavily demonetizing content that isn’t deemed appropriate to these new guidelines. This time in YouTube’s history dates back to 2016 and has been often referred to as “The Adpocalypse”, due to one of the main factors for the algorithm shift being a sudden spike in advertisers leaving the platform. While this specific change had little to do with misinformation, it was the first time I saw how much of an impact a change in a social media platform’s policies could have on its user base. Having witnessed this firsthand, it made me much more observant of the policy’s content guidelines on every social media application I utilize going forward. This observance towards policy changes would prove to be crucial for my overall sense of media literacy in recent years, as factors such as the Trump administration and a heightened political climate during the COVID-19 pandemic would shape how these platforms adapt their regulations to deal with the spread of misinformation.
In previous years, YouTube had implemented a four-pronged “4 Rs” strategy for combatting misinformation on their platform: Remove, Reduce, Raise, and Reward. YouTube would act to remove content that posed a serious risk of harm. Primary examples laid out on YouTube’s website include health and safety misinformation (a change most likely brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic) as well as misinformation that may upset democratic and voting processes. “Reduce” ties into the platform reducing misleading content being pushed onto users’ feeds from the site’s algorithm. YouTube has held a focus on raising authoritative, expert sources by pushing that specific content via the recommended tab and through search results. Lastly, YouTube has continued to reward creators on their platform through monetization for posting responsible content adhering to their community guidelines, while inversely restricting ads on content that hosts misinformation on their website (“Our Commitments”, n.d.).
While historically YouTube has taken a proactive stance in combatting misinformation, within the past year, the site has taken steps to loosen their content moderation, as long as these videos (which may have content breaking the website’s community guidelines) are deemed to be “in the publics’ interest”. YouTube is not alone in this change, as several other social media companies, like X and Meta have adopted a much more lax approach when moderating the content posted on the website; this is a change that many are attributing with the timing of Trump’s return to the White House with many Republicans advocating to stop the content moderation on these platforms, under the guise of “censorship”. The specific policy change increases the length of offending content to half of a video’s duration, whereas previously only a quarter was permitted. It is worth noting that unlike the other platforms mentioned, YouTube opted to not publicly announce this policy change (Grant & Mickle, 2025).
This policy appears like it would assist in propelling particular content over others in YouTube’s algorithm, particularly political, cultural and social issues that are in the public’s interest. Because there is currently no longer any threat of YouTube restricting/demonetizing content as long as the offensive material remains under the threshold outlined, as well as political commentary tending to be controversial and divisive in the black-and-white media landscape we live under (which boosts engagement), it would make sense that videos involving this type of commentary and news coverage featuring opinion pieces from the creator’s point of view will perform well under these new policy changes. A spokeswoman from YouTube has went on record establishing that the term “public interest” is always evolving based on the current climate of the platform, and their goal will always be to always protect free expression on the site while minimizing any harm caused from misinformation.
The critiques that many have expressed for YouTubes new content moderation shift is that it has the potential to grow hate speech on the platform and is partially responsible for the misinformation that has been proliferating throughout certain sectors of the site within recent months. Critics argue that this is simply a way for YouTube to save money on content moderation, all while allowing more content to remain up on the website for monetary gain through viewer engagement and more advertisements present. While this type of policy shift is not solely exclusive to YouTube, many people in opposition to YouTube’s new approach expressed YouTube’s extensive history in being proactive with content moderation to keep the platform advertiser-friendly by always focusing on prohibiting content that goes against their community guidelines, such as subject matter that contains nudity, graphic violence, and hate speech. It appears that through this change, there appears to be a much looser interpretation for this sort of content with YouTube’s content moderation team (Grant & Mickle, 2025).
My personal opinions are torn on this matter. As mentioned previously, I grew up on this platform and have seen many different iterations of the site through its evolution and innovation. Of course I am worried about how this policy will contribute towards the spread of misinformation, however I have always felt like YouTube is an entirely different beast compared to its contemporaries such as X, Instagram, and Facebook. While still misinformation-prone, because the site primarily focuses on long-form content, I believe it may set a dangerous precedent in automatically restricting controversial videos, even if there is a chance a strand of misinformation may be present. I am largely in favor of the new threshold set by YouTube, as I believe it allows more freedom of expression on their platform, however, I do think there needs to be safeguards and tools in place for users to be able to easily discern when a video has questionable, misinforming content.
My proposal that I believe would aid users in being able to dispel misinformation more easily is bringing back the like-to-dislike ratio, as well as providing media literacy strategies on trending, public interest video pages. Being able to see how many people disliked a video prior to watching it, while not 100% indicative of the content’s value, certainly is a useful tool viewers can utilize when assessing public-interest content. As of right now, when someone click onto a video, there is no clear and easy indicator for how that content was received by the community. Scrolling down to read the comments is not as intuitive enough for most. In addition to this implementation, I believe including media literacy strategies on high-traffic, public interest content (some that may be even deemed controversial) on the video page would have a positive effect in how the site communicates transparency with its user base. This tactic is similar to the pre-bunking strategy many social media website’s (including YouTube itself) employed during highly-politicized events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 U.S. election. While I also believe pre-bunking to be an effective strategy, inoculating these core media literacy values to YouTuber’s viewer base would assist in educating them in a subtle way so that way they are more equipped to discern misinformation in other areas of their media consumption. This is in contrast to pre-bunking, which deals with specific issues.
References:
Grant, N., & Mickle, T. (2025, June 9). YouTube Loosens Video Content Moderation Rules – The New York Times. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/09/technology/youtube-videos-content-moderation.html
Google. (n.d.). YouTube misinformation policies – how YouTube works. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/intl/ALL_in//howyoutubeworks/our-commitments/fighting-misinformation/