YouTube to remove all anti-vaccine content
YouTube will block all anti-vaccine content, moving beyond COVID-19 to include content that alleges vaccines cause chronic health effects or contains misinformation on the substances in vaccines, it said in a blog post on Wednesday.
The Google-owned video platform said its ban on Covid-19 vaccine misinformation, which was introduced last year, had seen 130,000 videos removed so far as a result, but more scope was needed to clamp down on broader false claims about other vaccines appearing online.
Under the new rules, any content which falsely alleges that any approved vaccine is dangerous and causes chronic health problems will be removed, as will videos that include misinformation about the content of vaccines.
The move comes as YouTube and other tech giants like Facebook Inc. and Twitter have been criticised for not doing enough to stop the spread of false health information on their sites.
