Social Cleansing

Jessica Macfarlane - 7 December 2020

Business insider finds that YouTube’s algorithms are still sucking people deep down into whirlpools of misinformation, however, anti-vaccination messages aren’t among those messages.

It has to be acknowledged that the sheer volume of misinformation being uploaded couldn’t possibly be interrogated without the assistance of code, but given the vast resources available to the platform, one wonders if they couldn’t afford to spend more money on humans to vet content to mitigate against counterproductive issues like this.

It is concerning that this cleansing of conspiracies is also quieting skeptical voices on the platform. As Woodford himself said, “Well, I’ve got the message. Don’t expose conspiracy theories, don’t expose medical misinformation”.