YouTube CEO describes indoctrination efforts at World Economic Forum

While it is no secret that YouTube censors videos that challenge the company’s political dogma, it was not widespread knowledge exactly how the platform cherry-picks information it shows users. 

Speaking at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2022 in Davos last week, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki revealed that the Google-owned platform does not always show users content tailored to their preferences, but will select the information YouTube feels the user should see. 

Wojcicki began by saying the company is dedicated to “fighting misinformation”, which it does in three ways. 

The first, she said, is simply anything that doesn’t violate YouTube’s many policies, which includes the origin of COVID-19. 

“So, the first would be from a policy standpoint, we would look at content that we would think about in terms of being violative of our policies,” said Wojcicki in response to the moderator’s question. “So if you look at COVID, for example, we came up with ten different policies that we said would be violative.” 

The CEO then mocked groups who have independent theories about world phenomena. 

“Like an example of that would be saying that COVID came from something other than a virus. And we did see people attacking 5G equipment, for example, because they thought that it was causing COVID,” she said as chuckles were heard around the room. “And so that would just be an example of a policy that we would remove. So we do remove content based on those policies. We actually publish that in a transparency report.” 

Wojcicki did not elaborate on how the company verifies that certain views and theories are untrue, if at all. 

But in addition to removing certain information, YouTube also inserts information approved by authorities. 

“The second one would be really raising up authoritative information. So if you are dealing with a sensitive subject like news, health, science, we are going to make sure that what we're recommending is coming from a trusted, well-known publisher that can be reliable.” 

It is unclear how YouTube determines which publishers are “trusted” and “reliable”. 

In addition to removing contrary information and feeding authority-approved information, YouTube also downranks, or “hides”, content it deems as “lower quality”. 

“The third is making sure that if there's content that's borderline content that technically meets our policy but is lower quality, that's content that we basically will not recommend to our users. Our users can still access it, but they will not recommend it.” 

Wojcicki did not define “lower quality” or disclose the process by which content is determined as being such. 

Finally, the CEO said that the company does not monetize information that is “generally understood” to be inaccurate, though she did not explain how the company determines something as “generally understood” and by whom. 

“And then lastly, we're just really careful about what we monetize. So, we always want to make sure that there's no incentive. So, for example, with regard to climate change, we don't monetize any kind of climate change material. So, there's no incentive for you to keep publishing that material that is propagating something that is generally understood as not accurate information.”