More than 80 fact-checking organizations around the world sent an open letter to YouTube management on Wednesday, calling for more effective measures to tackle disinformation and offering their collaboration to the video hosting platform.
"Every day, we see that YouTube is one of the main vectors of online disinformation in the world", denounce these media and NGOs.
"We do not see much effort on the part of YouTube to implement policies that solve the problem," they accuse in this letter to his boss, Susan Wojcicki.
The signatory media are based in around 40 countries such as France (Les Surligneurs, Science Feedback), the United States (PolitiFact, The Washington Post), Spain (Maldita.es), Senegal and Kenya (Africa Check )
YouTube responded by claiming to have "invested heavily in policies and products (...) to reduce the spread of false information".
“Much progress has been made,” added YouTube spokeswoman Elena Hernandez, for whom fact-checking is “one piece of a larger puzzle to tackle the spread of disinformation”.
"One of the greatest battles of our time"
The signatory fact-checkers are worried about "rampant disinformation", further accelerated by the Covid-19 epidemic.
Conspiracy documentaries or videos promoting false remedies have garnered millions of views on the site, which, like Google, belongs to the Alphabet group.
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Remaining worried about risks such as political destabilization, the fact-checkers say they are ready to "engage with YouTube to make their proposals a reality", which they detail in the letter.
"This battle is one of the greatest of our time, and we must lead it by collaborating with the platforms", defended during a press conference Cristina Tardaguila, founder of Agencia Lupa in Brazil.
These four major avenues for improvement concern both the opacity of algorithms and “repeat offender” accounts, or non-English speaking videos that regularly pass “under the radar” of the site.
After the proliferation of fake news during the 2016 US presidential campaign, Facebook partnered with media outlets around the world to fight the spread of fake news.