The online video company owned by Alphabet Inc is also
banning prominent anti-vaccine activists, taking down several channels, the
Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing YouTube’s Vice President Of
Global Trust and Safety Matt Halprin. These include Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and
Joseph Mercola, who have long been high-profile figures in the anti-vaccine
movement.
The move comes as YouTube and other tech giants like
Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. have been criticized for not doing enough to
stop the spread of false health information on their sites.
Even as YouTube takes a tougher stance on misinformation, it
faces backlash around the world. On Tuesday, Russian state-backed broadcaster
RT's German-language channels were deleted from YouTube, as the company said
the channels had breached its COVID-19 misinformation policy.
Russia on Wednesday called the move "unprecedented
information aggression," and threatened to block YouTube. -Reuters