GOOGL Alphabet Inc

By Jack Nicas 

YouTube said it is planning changes to give users more context for videos promoting conspiracy theories or state-sponsored content, the latest effort by an internet giant to clean up its platform amid criticism over its role in spreading misinformation.

YouTube said it would on Friday start labeling all videos from what it identifies as state-funded broadcasters. The step would affect a range of sources, including the U.S.'s Public Broadcasting Service, or PBS. But it is significant in part because YouTube has been a major conduit for RT, the Russian state news organization that U.S. intelligence officials called "the Kremlin's principal international propaganda outlet."

YouTube--part of Alphabet Inc.'s Google unit--is also considering surfacing relevant videos from credible news sources alongside clips peddling conspiracy theories, such as those claiming the moon landing was a hoax, YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan said in an interview. YouTube has long been rife with such videos.

The company said that change was early in development, so it's unclear when it would take effect--or how it would select conspiracy theories.

Google and other Silicon Valley giants have scrambled in recent months to address a wave of criticism from Congress, academics, and others how their platforms influence public opinion and discourse. The debate was stoked in part by evidence that Russian actors seeking to manipulate U.S. voters before and after the 2016 election reached more than 100 million people via the tech giants' sites.

After initially playing down the influence of their platforms last year, the companies have offered a string of mea culpas and proposed solutions. Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg pledged last month to fix problems on his site, including by promoting "broadly trusted" news sources. Twitter Inc. said this week that is has notified roughly 1.4 million people who interacted with accounts now known to be backed by a Russian government-linked group.

Journalists and academics over the past year uncovered an abundance of objectionable content on YouTube, including videos that promoted racist and extremist views and put children in compromising situations. In many cases, YouTube ran ads before the unsavory videos, prompting many top advertisers to pull spending from the site.

Mr. Mohan said that he last year directed his team to improve YouTube as a place to get news, including moves to promote "an ever-changing list of authoritative news sources" that it selects with the Google News team.

"The principle here is to provide more information to our users, and let our users make the judgment themselves, as opposed to us being in the business of providing any sort of editorial judgment on any of these things ourselves," he said.

He declined to comment on RT, which as of late last year had nearly 5.5 billion views across more than 20 YouTube channels-- among the site's most-watched news networks.

The new policy to label state broadcasters would extend to any news organization that received government funding, he said. So RT's videos will have a label appended to the bottom that says, "RT is funded in whole or in part by the Russian government."

PBS will carry a label calling it a "publicly-funded American broadcaster."

YouTube in recent months also quietly expanded a change to its search engine, in order to return more mainstream news sources for news-related queries.

YouTube first tweaked its search results for breaking news in October after it was criticized for surfacing conspiracy theories about a mass shooting that killed 59 people during a concert in Las Vegas.

The change appears to have improved the search results for some key news events that have attracted conspiracies. Three days after the Las Vegas shooting, for instance, the fifth result for a search on YouTube about the attacks was a video titled: "Proof Las Vegas Shooting Was a FALSE FLAG attack--Shooter on 4th Floor." But on Thursday night, the results were all mainstream news sources.

The policy hasn't always worked, though. On Wednesday, after a train carrying some Republican lawmakers collided with a truck, searches for "GOP train crash" on YouTube returned as the first result a live stream from Alex Jones, the founder of conspiracy-theory site Infowars, and as the third a video titled, "Train Crash Attempted Assassination of GOP Congress Members?"

YouTube said its algorithm hadn't quickly enough recognized the search as a news-related query.

"With several other major events over the past few months we have been pleased with the results, but there is more work to do," it added.

Write to Jack Nicas at jack.nicas@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 02, 2018 05:44 ET (10:44 GMT)

Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL)
Historical Stock Chart
From Mar 2024 to Apr 2024

Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL)
Historical Stock Chart
From Apr 2023 to Apr 2024