YouTube’s $25M Investment to Ensure That Fake News Stay Off The Platform
- YouTube has launched a project to ensure the news found on this platform will be more trustworthy.
- This project includes closer scrutiny of items posted online such as using fact-checking processes. It will go as far as educating the younger generation about critical thinking.
- The project will mean an investment of $25 million.
It seems YouTube wants to become a market leader in the news industry. There's an investment of $25 million to help this platform become more reliable. It wants to counter fake news in its breaking stories and the plan is quite diverse.
At the moment YouTube already works with Google News Initiative to combat the problem of fake news. One of the new features is a support group created to advise on news matters and functions on the platform. This panel will include media experts and prominent news entities such as Vox Media. In addition, there's a plan to partake in digital literacy education strategies. This aims to help young people think critically instead of accepting all they hear or see on social media. To attract more reliable content, YouTube will provide grants to news agencies. The focus will be to help them produce quality news in video format.
So where did this all start? In part, the motivation behind this project is Google itself. YouTube's project is actually part of the Google News Network's $300 million investment to fight fake news. YouTube is a subsidiary of Google since it was purchased by the company in 2006. The other motivation is strong opinions about YouTube being a source of conspiracy theories. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki made public promises to improve the platform's reliability, so this move seemed inevitable.
How will the initiatives change users' experiences? While browsers will see fewer links to Wikipedia, you will see sources of news stories. Everything is focused on helping browsers make their own conclusions.
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