YouTube resolves to suppress information on cancer, other conditions

YouTube Tuesday announced its decision to extend its suppression of medical information to include cancer and other conditions while marketing government messaging.

The video streaming giant has drawn heavy criticism — and even legal action — for its heavy promotion of government misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic and suppression of medical science. Nevertheless, the Google-owned company says it “learned critical lessons” about promoting “local and global health authority guidance” and pledged to expand its censorship policies.

“We’re taking what we’ve learned so far about the most effective ways to tackle medical misinformation to simplify our approach for creators, viewers, and partners,” YouTube wrote in a blog post.

While acknowledging that science “can change over time as we learn more,” the platform said it will follow “scientific consensus,” an oxymoronic euphemism for government guidance.

This includes non-government science on cancer, YouTube clarified.

Starting today and ramping up in the coming weeks, we will begin removing content that promotes cancer treatments proven to be harmful or ineffective, or content that discourages viewers from seeking professional medical treatment. This includes content that promotes unproven treatments in place of approved care or as a guaranteed cure, and treatments that have been specifically deemed harmful by health authorities. For instance, a video that claims ‘garlic cures cancer,’ or ‘take vitamin C instead of radiation therapy’ would be removed.

In addition to suppressing such information, YouTube is teaming up with Mayo Clinic to publish a “playlist of engaging, informative cancer-related videos from a range of authoritative sources.”

Any content which “contradicts local health authorities or the World Health Organization (WHO)” will be sorted into three categories: misinformation on how to prevent maladies, misinformation about treatments, and content which “disputes the existence of specific health conditions.”

However, YouTube may allow the content if it is in the “public interest”:

This means that we may allow content that is sufficiently in the public interest to remain on YouTube, even if it otherwise violates our policies – for example, a video of a public hearing or comments made by national political candidates on the campaign trail that disputes health authority guidance, or graphic footage from active warzones or humanitarian crises. We may also make exceptions for personal testimonies or content that discusses the results of a specific medical study. 

But YouTube is not always the lone decision maker on what constitutes “misinformation.”

The video streaming platform is part of the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), a coalition of the world’s largest news publishers and social media networks who together form a supreme court of truth which adjudicates on what information gets passed to the public and what is withheld. The words used by former BBC Director-General Tony Hall when he formed the junta in 2019 was “to tackle the rise of misinformation.” 

“Last month I convened, behind closed doors, a Trusted News Summit at the BBC, which brought together global tech platforms and publishers,” Hall announced. “The goal was to arrive at a practical set of actions we can take together, right now, to tackle the rise of misinformation.” 

Current members of the TNI include The Washington Post, ABC News, Associated Press, AFP, The Financial Times, The Hindu, The Nation Media Group, European Broadcasting Union, Reuters, Meta (Facebook), X (formerly Twitter), Microsoft, and Google/YouTube. 

By 2020, TNI had a system set up in which the corporations would alert each other to unapproved information, which would immediately be scoured from the mainstream internet. 

BBC World Service Group Director Jamie Angus said in October 2020, “Our Trusted News Initiative is [an] international partnership initiative convened by the BBC, which links media organisations and social-media platforms. The group has developed a shared early-warning system to alert partners about Disinformation.” 

It was the TNI that decided to sideline or ban any reporting that COVID may have originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, that the COVID vaccines do not prevent infection, that vaccinated people can transmit COVID to others, and that compromising emails and videos were found on a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden. 

But not only were publishers who reported such information exiled from the information highway — sites that simply reported that such claims were being made by potentially credible sources were also sidelined. 

BBC’s Jessica Cecil made several statements about the “fast alert” system set up between TNI members.  

“We don’t fact check; but once we learn from a partner that something is unreliable, that’s when we alert each other. . . . [A]ll participants signed up to a clear set of expectations of how to act,” said Cecil in 2021.