COVID-RELATED MISINFORMATION ON YOUTUBE The Spread of Misinformation Videos on Social Media and the Effectiveness of Platform Policies (original) (raw)

For this memo, we identified all Covid-related videos which circulated on social media, but which YouTube eventually removed because they contained false information. Between October, 2019 and June, 2020 there were 8,105 such videos-less than 1% of all YouTube videos about the coronavirus. We find that: • It took YouTube on average 41 days to remove videos containing false information, based on a subset of videos for which this data was available. • Surprisingly, Covid-related misinformation videos do not find their audience through YouTube itself, but largely by being shared on Facebook. • Facebook placed warning labels about false information only on 55 videos, less than 1% of the misinformation videos shared on the platform. • Misinformation videos were shared almost 20 million times on social media, which is more than the shares gathered by the five largest English-language news sources on YouTube combined (CNN, ABC News, BBC, Fox News and Al Jazeera)

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