N E W S & E V E NTS

Supporting the 2020 U.S.

election
By The YouTube Team

Dec.09.2020

Updates to our work supporting the integrity of

the 2020 U.S. election.

Over the past weeks and months, we’ve seen people

coming to YouTube to learn more about where and how
to vote or learning more about a candidate or an issue.
We’ve seen news organizations grow their audience.
And we’ve seen people turn to YouTube for the latest
election results or simply to follow an historic event with
the highest voting turnout in over a century in the U.S.

Our main goal going into the election season was to

make sure we’re connecting people with authoritative
information, while also limiting the reach of
misinformation and removing harmful content. The
work here is ongoing and we wanted to provide an
update.

Removing content that violates our

policies

Our Community Guidelines prohibit spam, scams, or

other manipulated media, coordinated inEuence
operations, and any content that seeks to incite
violence. Since September, we've terminated over 8000
channels and thousands of harmful and misleading
elections-related videos for violating our existing
policies. Over 77% of those removed videos were taken
down before they had 100 views.

We also work to make sure that the line between what is

removed and what is allowed is drawn in the right place.
Our policies prohibit misleading viewers about where
and how to vote. We also disallow content alleging
widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of a
historical U.S. Presidential election. However in some
cases, that has meant allowing controversial views on
the outcome or process of counting votes of a current
election as election oPcials have worked to Qnalize
counts.

Yesterday was the safe harbor deadline for the U.S.

Presidential election and enough states have certiQed
their election results to determine a President-elect.
Given that, we will start removing any piece of content
uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people
by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the
outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line
with our approach towards historical U.S. Presidential
elections. For example, we will remove videos claiming
that a Presidential candidate won the election due to
widespread software glitches or counting errors. We will
begin enforcing this policy today, and will ramp up in the
weeks to come. As always, news coverage and
commentary on these issues can remain on our site if
there’s suPcient education, documentary, scientiQc or
artistic context.

Connecting people to authoritative

information

While only a small portion of watch time is election-

related content, YouTube continues to be an important
source of election news. On average 88% of the videos
in top 10 search results related to elections came from
authoritative news sources (amongst the rest are things
like newsy late-night shows, creator videos and
commentary). And the most viewed channels and
videos are from news channels like NBC and CBS.

We also showed information panels linking both to

Google’s election results feature, which sources election
results from The Associated Press, and to the
Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA)
“Rumor Control” page for debunking election integrity
misinformation, alongside these and over 200,000 other
election-related videos. Collectively, these information
panels have been shown over 4.5 billion times. Starting
today, we will update this information panel, linking to
the “2020 Electoral College Results” page from the
OPce of the Federal Register, noting that as of
December 8, states have certiQed Presidential election
results, with Joe Biden as the President-elect. It will also
continue to include a link to CISA, explaining that states
certify results after ensuring ballots are properly
counted and correcting irregularities and errors.

Additionally, since Election Day, relevant fact check

information panels, from third party fact checkers, were
triggered over 200,000 times above relevant election-
related search results, including for voter fraud
narratives such as “Dominion voting machines” and
“Michigan recount.”

Now let’s look at recommendations, one of the main

ways our viewers Qnd content. Limiting the reach of
borderline content and prominently surfacing
authoritative information are important ways we protect
people from problematic content that doesn’t violate our
Community Guidelines. Over 70% of recommendations
on election-related topics came from authoritative news
sources and the top recommended videos and channels
for election-related content were primarily authoritative
news. In fact, the top 10 authoritative news channels
were recommended over 14X more than the top 10 non-
authoritative channels on election-related content.

Despite these encouraging results, we recognize there's

always more to do. For example, while problematic
misinformation represents a fraction of 1% of what's
watched on YouTube in the U.S., we know we can bring
that number down even more. And some videos, while
not recommended prominently on YouTube, continue to
get high views, sometimes coming from other sites.
We're continuing to consider this and other new
challenges as we make ongoing improvements.

We understand the need for intense scrutiny on our

elections-related work. Our teams work hard to ensure
we are striking a balance between allowing for a broad
range of political speech and making sure our platform
isn't abused to incite real-world harm or broadly spread
harmful misinformation. We welcome ongoing debate
and discussion and will keep engaging with experts,
researchers and organizations to ensure that our
policies and products are meeting that goal. And as
always, we'll apply learnings from this election to our
ongoing efforts to protect the integrity of elections
around the world.

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