YouTube Stops Promoting Conspiracy Theory Videos

Forbes reports:

In an official blog post published January 25th about YouTube’s changes to its recommendation algorithm, the Google-owned company announced they would be cracking down on conspiracy-laden videos and other “borderline content”… by ceasing to list them in the “Up Next” sidebar.

Examples listed of content no longer being recommended included 9/11 truther documentaries, flat earth conspiracy videos and content peddling fake miracle cures. YouTube stressed in their post this change would apply to “less than one percent” of all content on YouTube and the changes will be implemented by “a combination of machine learning and real people.”

The post explained the human evaluators will be trained using public guidelines and the change will be “gradual” and “initially will only affect recommendations of a very small set of videos in the United States.”