YouTube are expanding their efforts to make sure that any news on YouTube is illegitimate with disinformation rife online.

YouTube is huge and full of videos on everything you could imagine, and then more. Amongst its leagues of content are a lot of news and information videos, from the news industry, independent sources, and just regular people.

As is unfortunately common on any populous website, this means that there is also a lot of disinformation on YouTube. People want to be assured that, whether its political news, global updates, economic issues, or even the sports scores, they are receiving factual information and as difficult as it is, it is up to these websites to make efforts to ensure that is the case.

YouTube have improved their legitimacy by enhancing their existing efforts to make sure that videos being watched can be trusted. For a start, they’re raising the prominence of videos that come from ‘authoritative sources‘. At the same time this should be push less trustworthy videos down lower.

They are also expanding their fact check information panels to a country that funnily is only now getting it, the United States. The feature was also made available in Brazil and India last year and hopefully YouTube will be expanding them further globally in the near future.

The fact check panels come up on certain search results when they’re about a specific claim. The panel will provide information from an independent third-party publisher on whether the claims related to your search are true, false or partly true.

It certainly comes at a poignant time when Coronavirus news is everywhere you look, and it’s crucial the information we receive on it is factual. As well, though it may be delayed, there is a US election approaching and misinformation has been at the centre of controversy over elections around the world in recent years.

YouTube said, in their announcement:

As always, it will take some time for our systems to fully ramp up. Our systems will become more accurate, and over time, we’ll roll this feature out to more countries. 


We are committed to our responsibility to protect the YouTube community, and expanding our fact check information panels is one of the many steps we are taking to raise up authoritative sources, provide relevant and authoritative context to our users, and continue to reduce the spread of harmful misinformation on YouTube.

You can read more on YouTube’s Blog and find links with more details about what they’re doing.