As part of the company’s stated commitment to address the concerns viewers, creators and advertisers had with the platform in 2017, YouTube today announced that it’s adding notices to news videos that were produced with partial or full funding from government organizations.
Moving forward, in the U.S. YouTube will display a notice below a video that was uploaded by a news broadcaster that receives some level of government or public funding. Viewers will be able to see the notice above the video’s title. It will include a link to the broadcaster’s Wikipedia page entry.
“Our goal is to equip users with additional information to help them better understand the sources of news that they choose to watch on YouTube,” said YouTube’s Geoff Samek, a senior product manager with the company, in the blog post accompanying the announcement.
For the time being, the feature is only available in the U.S. However, YouTube says it will make it available in other markets in the future.
“We don’t expect it to be perfect,” writes Samek, by way of explaining the limited rollout.
In 2017, YouTube garnered a significant amount of criticism for its slow and tepid reaction to Logan Paul’s ‘suicide forest’ video. Like other tech companies that operate in the media space, the company has also been criticised for not doing enough to curb the spread of ‘fake news’.
Source: YouTube
