YouTube - Further Controlling the COVID-19 Vaccine Narrative

For those of you that have read George Orwell's 1984, one of my favourite books, Winston Smith, an employee at the ironically named Ministry of Truth, is responsible for destroying history that is inconvenient to the Party.  Over the past two years, it has become increasingly obvious that we are living under the same sort of authoritarianism, in this case, led by the world's social media platforms.

  

In its latest move to destroy any narrative that doesn't follow its preferred version of the pandemic and accompanying vaccine rollout, YouTube, a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google's parent company, has made the following announcement:

 

 

Here are some highlights:

 

"Crafting policy around medical misinformation comes charged with inherent challenges and tradeoffs. Scientific understanding evolves as new research emerges, and firsthand, personal experience regularly plays a powerful role in online discourse. Vaccines in particular have been a source of fierce debate over the years, despite consistent guidance from health authorities about their effectiveness. Today, we're expanding our medical misinformation policies on YouTube with new guidelines on currently administered vaccines that are approved and confirmed to be safe and effective by local health authorities and the WHO.

 

Our Community Guidelines already prohibit certain types of medical misinformation. We've long removed content that promotes harmful remedies, such as saying drinking turpentine can cure diseases. At the onset of COVID-19, we built on these policies when the pandemic hit, and worked with experts to develop 10 new policies around COVID-19 and medical misinformation. Since last year, we’ve removed over 130,000 videos for violating our COVID-19 vaccine policies."

 

Notice how proud YouTube is of its ability to remove over 130,000 videos.  Way to go, YouTube!

 

So, what is being banned?

  

"...content that falsely alleges that approved vaccines are dangerous and cause chronic health effects, claims that vaccines do not reduce transmission or contraction of disease, or contains misinformation on the substances contained in vaccines will be removed. This would include content that falsely says that approved vaccines cause autism, cancer or infertility, or that substances in vaccines can track those who receive them. Our policies not only cover specific routine immunizations like for measles or Hepatitis B, but also apply to general statements about vaccines."

 

YouTube claims that they have consulted with local and international health organizations and other experts when designing their program of antivaccine censorship.  I'm guessing that the World Health Organization aka the Bill Gates Health Organization was part of the team which helped establish YouTube's guidelines.

 

Not to worry though, YouTube is still allowing content that is important to the ongoing debate regarding vaccines and will allow the following:

 

"...we will continue to allow content about vaccine policies, new vaccine trials, and historical vaccine successes or failures on YouTube. Personal testimonials relating to vaccines will also be allowed, so long as the video doesn't violate other Community Guidelines, or the channel doesn't show a pattern of promoting vaccine hesitancy."

 

Given that absolutely no scientist has a complete picture of both the harms and protections offered by the COVID-19 vaccines since Phase 3 trials are not scheduled for completion for at least the next year, YouTube certainly seems to have cornered the market on "vaccine truth".

 

Just in case you cared, here is YouTube's newly crafted Vaccine information policy:

 

Joseph Goebbels would be utterly amazed at how easily the social media platforms of the new millennium have been at crafting a narrative that suits their own version of reality.  Unfortunately, YouTube hadn't quite come to the realization that controlling the vaccine narrative is not necessarily in its best interest business wise.  Thanks to YouTube's increasingly heavy-handed censorship, a number of alternative media platforms (i.e. Bitchute, Odysee etcetera) have appeared where censorship is non-existent, allowing determined physicians and researchers to spread their message to the masses.  I hate to tell YouTube, but the world can live without videos of cats and car accidents.

YouTube - Censoring the COVID-19 Narrative

With the Big Tech Congressional antitrust hearing taking place in the hallowed halls of Washington, a fine example of how the technology monopoly is controlling a key part of the global narrative is timely.  In this posting, we will take a look at how Google/YouTube is handling its responsibility to its stakeholders during the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

As we all know, Google's YouTube has increasingly become a heavily censored platform in which dissenting views are not permitted.  By controlling the COVID-19 narrative, Google has essentially white-washed any views that go against those promoted by governments, the mainstream media and the World Health Organization (aka The Bill and Melinda Gates Health Organization).

 

Here is a list of what is "verboten" under the guise of protecting the unwashed masses from ourselves:

 

"YouTube doesn't allow content about COVID-19 that poses a serious risk of egregious harm. 

 

YouTube doesn't allow content that spreads medical misinformation that contradicts the World Health Organization (WHO) or local health authorities’ medical information about COVID-19. This is limited to content that contradicts WHO or local health authorities’ guidance on:

 

Treatment 

Prevention

Diagnostic 

Transmission"

 

Here is what Google terms as "misinformation":

 

"1.) "Treatment Misinformation: Discourages someone from seeking medical treatment by encouraging the use of cures or remedies to treat COVID-19.

 

a.) Claims that COVID-19 doesn’t exist or that people do not die from it 

 

b.) Content that encourages the use of home remedies in place of medical treatment such as  consulting a doctor or going to the hospital

 

c.) Content that encourages the use of prayer or rituals in place of medical treatment

 

d.) Content that claims that a vaccine for coronavirus is available or that there’s a guaranteed cure

 

e.) Content that claims that any currently-available medicine prevents you from getting the coronavirus

 

f.) Other content that discourages people from consulting a medical professional or seeking medical advice

 

2.) Prevention Misinformation: Content that promotes prevention methods that contradict WHO or local health authorities.

 

3.) Diagnostic Misinformation: Content that promotes diagnostic methods that contradict WHO or local health authorities.

 

4.) Transmission Misinformation: Content that promotes transmission information that contradicts WHO or local health authorities.

 

a.) Content that claims that COVID-19 is not caused by a viral infection

 

b.) Content that claims COVID-19 is not contagious

 

c.) Content that claims that COVID-19 cannot spread in certain climates or geographies

 

d.) Content that claims that any group or individual has guaranteed immunity to the virus or cannot transmit the virus

 

e.) Content that disputes the efficacy of WHO or local health authorities’ guidance on physical distancing or self-isolation measures to reduce transmission of COVID-19"

 

Let's look at some more specific examples of what is not allowed on YouTube when it comes to furthering the discussion about the COVID-19 pandemic:

 

"1.) Denial that COVID-19 exists

 

2.) Claims that people have not died from COVID-19

 

3.) Claims that there’s a guaranteed vaccine for COVID-19

 

4.) Claims that a specific treatment or medicine is a guaranteed cure for COVID-19

 

5.) Claims that certain people have immunity to COVID-19 due to their race or nationality

 

6.) Encouraging taking home remedies instead of getting medical treatment when sick

 

7.)Discouraging people from consulting a medical professional if they’re sick

 

8.) Content that claims that holding your breath can be used as a diagnostic test for COVID-19

 

9.) Videos alleging that if you avoid Asian food, you won’t get the coronavirus

 

10.) Videos alleging that setting off fireworks can clean the air of the virus

 

11.) Claims that COVID-19 is caused by radiation from 5G networks

 

12.) Videos alleging that the COVID-19 test is the cause of the virus

 

13.)Claims that countries with hot climates will not experience the spread of the virus

 

14.) Videos alleging that social distancing and self-isolation are not effective in reducing the spread of the virus"

 

But, apparently it's okay with Google if the World Health Organization and government health officials clearly change their minds on how the SARS-CoV-2 virus spreads, the effectiveness and use of masks and other issues that have morphed during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Of course, Google provides itself with an "out" by stating that YouTube's policies on COVID-19 are subject to change in response to changes to global or local health authorities' guidance on the virus.  Sadly, if you've already been banned by YouTube, it's just too bad for you even though your original thesis may turn out to be correct.

 

This begs the question; how many virologists, epidemiologists and vaccinologists does YouTube have on staff and what individuals (Bill Gates?) and organizations (WHO?) are sponsoring them?

 

Should YouTube's COVID-19 Medical Misinformation Policy happen to disappear, here is a screen capture showing the policy in its entirety:

 

Censorship - it's alive and well and living in Mountain View, California.  The truth is AWOL.

How Social Media is Controlling the COVID Narrative

On April 16, 2020, the following article appeared on the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) website:

The two physicians, Dr. Daniel Erickson and Dr. Artin Massih, conducted a very lengthy press briefing with ABC 23 News in Bakersfield, California in which they discussed the current COVID-19 pandemic.  The two physicians own Accelerated Urgent Care.

Here is an example of the use of social media control where the first part of the interview used to appear on YouTube:

Here is what happened to part two:

Currently, this link is live and provides you with part one. This link used to provide you with part two but now this is what you see:

The two doctors reviewed data for Kern County in California and concluded that the lockdown should end now, a direct challenge to the current COVID-19 orthodoxy from what the World Health Organization and most other governments around the world are recommending. 

Let's look at some key excerpts with all bolds being mine.  Here is the background basis for their analysis:

"We’d like to look at how we’ve responded as a nation, and why you responded. Our first initial response two months ago was a little bit of fear: [the government] decided to shut down travel to and from China. These are good ideas when you don’t have any facts. [Governments] decided to keep people at home and isolate them. Typically you quarantine the sick. When someone has measles you quarantine them. We’ve never seen where we quarantine the healthy. 

So that’s kind of how we started. We don’t know what’s going on, we see this new virus. How should we respond? So we did that initially, and over the last couple months we’ve gained a lot of data typically. We’re going to go over the numbers a little bit to kind of help you see how widespread COVID is, and see how we should be responding to it based on its prevalence throughout society—or the existence of the cases that we already know about…."

Here's what the data showed them:

"So if you look at California—these numbers are from yesterday—we have 33,865 COVID cases, out of a total of 280,900 total tested. That’s 12% of Californians were positive for COVID. So we don’t, the initial—as you guys know, the initial models were woefully inaccurate. They predicted millions of cases of death—not of prevalence or incidence—but death. That is not materializing. What is materializing is, in the state of California is 12% positives. You have a 0.03 chance of dying from COVID in the state of California. Does that necessitate sheltering in place? Does that necessitate shutting down medical systems? Does that necessitate people being out of work? 96% of people in California who get COVID would recover, with almost no significant sequelae;  or no significant continuing medical problems. Two months ago we didn’t know this. The more you test, the more positives you get. The prevalence number goes up, and the death rate stays the same. So [the death rate] gets smaller and smaller and smaller. And as we move through this data—what I want you to see is—millions of cases, small death. Millions of cases, small death. 

We extrapolate data, we test people, and then we extrapolate for the entire community based on the numbers. The initial models were so inaccurate they’re not even correct. And some of them were based on social distancing and still predicted hundreds of thousands of deaths, which has been inaccurate. In New York the ones they tested they found 39% positive. So if they tested the whole state would we indeed have 7.5 million cases? We don’t know; we will never test the entire state. So we extrapolate out; we use the data we have because it’s the most we have versus a predictive model that has been nowhere in the ballpark of accurate. How many deaths do they have? 19,410 out of 19 million people, which is a 0.1% chance of dying from COVID in the state of New York. If you are indeed diagnosed with COVID-19, 92% of you will recover.

We’ve tested over 4 million… which gives us a 19.6% positive out of those who are tested for COVID-19. So if this is a typical extrapolation 328 million people times 19.6 is 64 million. That’s a significant amount of people with COVID; it’s similar to the flu. If you study the numbers in 2017 and 2018 we had 50 to 60 million with the flu. And we had a similar death rate in the deaths the United States were 43,545—similar to the flu of 2017-2018. We always have between 37,000 and 60,000 deaths in the United States, every single year. No pandemic talk. No shelter-in-place. No shutting down businesses…"

Here are their comments about the human immune system and how it effectively battles viruses and bacteria:

"I’d like to go over some basic things about how the immune system functions so people have a good understanding. The immune system is built by exposure to antigens: viruses, bacteria.  When you’re a little child crawling on the ground, putting stuff in your mouth, viruses and bacteria come in. You form an antigen antibody complex. You form IgG IgM. This is how your immune system is built. You don’t take a small child put them in bubble wrap in a room and say, “go have a healthy immune system.” 

This is immunology, microbiology 101. This is the basis of what we’ve known for years. When you take human beings and you say, “go into your house, clean all your counters—Lysol them down you’re gonna kill 99% of viruses and bacteria; wear a mask; don’t go outside,” what does it do to our immune system? Our immune system is used to touching. We share bacteria. Staphylococcus, streptococcal, bacteria, viruses. 

Sheltering in place decreases your immune system. And then as we all come out of shelter in place with a lower immune system and start trading viruses, bacteria—what do you think is going to happen? Disease is going to spike. And then you’ve got diseases spike—amongst a hospital system with furloughed doctors and nurses. This is not the combination we want to set up for a healthy society. It doesn’t make any sense."

Here are their comments about the pressure to use COVID-19 as a cause of death:

"When someone dies in this country right now they’re not talking about the high blood pressure, the diabetes, the stroke. They say they died from COVID. We’ve been to hundreds of autopsies. You don’t talk about one thing, you talk about comorbidities. COVID was part of it, it is not the reason they died folks. When I’m writing up my death report I’m being pressured to add COVID. 

Why is that? Why are we being pressured to add COVID? To maybe increase the numbers, and make it look a little bit worse than it is. We’re being pressured in-house to add COVID to the diagnostic list when we think it has nothing to do with the actual cause of death. The actual cause of death was not COVID, but it’s being reported as one of the disease processes and being added to the death list. COVID didn’t kill them, 25 years of tobacco use killed."

Here are their comments about why lockdowns don't work:

"…Did we respond appropriately? Initially the response, fine shut it down, but as the data comes across—and we say now, wait a second, we’ve never, ever responded like this in the history of the country why are we doing this now? Any time you have something new in the community medical community it sparks fear—and I would have done what Dr. Fauci did—so we both would have initially. Because the first thing you do is, you want to make sure you limit liability—and deaths—and I think what they did was brilliant, initially. But you know, looking at theories and models—which is what these folks use—is very different than the way the actual virus presents itself throughout communities….

Nobody talks about the fact that coronavirus lives on plastics for three days and we’re all sheltering in place. Where’d you get your water bottles from? Costco. Where did you get that plastic shovel from? Home Depot. If I swab things in your home I would likely find COVID-19. And so you think you’re protected. Do you see the lack of consistency here? Do you think you’re protected from COVID when you wear gloves that transfer disease everywhere? Those gloves have bacteria all over them. We wear masks in an acute setting to protect us. We’re not wearing masks. Why is that? Because we understand microbiology; we understand immunology; and we want strong immune systems. I don’t want to hide in my home, develop a weak immune system, and then come out and get disease."

Here are their comments on the negative impact of the lockdown:

"I wanted to talk about the effects of COVID-19, the secondary effects. COVID-19 is one aspect of our health sector. What has it caused to have us be involved in social isolation?  What does it cause that we are seeing the community respond to? Child molestation is increasing at a severe rate. We could go over multiple cases of children who have been molested due to angry family members who are intoxicated, who are home, who have no paycheck. Spousal abuse: we are seeing people coming in here with black eyes and cuts on their face. It’s an obvious abuse of case. These are things that will affect them for a lifetime, not for a season. Alcoholism, anxiety, depression, suicide. Suicide is spiking; education is dropped off; economic collapse. Medical industry we’re all suffering because our staff isn’t here and we have no volume. We have clinics from Fresno to San Diego and these things are spiking in our community. These things will affect people for a lifetime, not for a season.'

Here is what they have to say about the continuing the lockdown:

"Do we need to still shelter in place? Our answer is emphatically no. Do we need businesses to be shut down? Emphatically no. Do we need to have it, do we need to test them, and get them back to work? Yes, we do. The the secondary effects that we went over—the child abuse, alcoholism, loss of revenue—all these are, in our opinion, a significantly more detrimental thing to society than a virus that has proven similar in nature to the seasonal flu we have every year. 

We also need to put measures in place so economic shutdown like this does not happen again. We want to make sure we understand that quarantining the sick is what we do, not quarantine the healthy. We need to make sure if you’re gonna dance on someone’s constitutional rights you better have a good reason. You better have a really good scientific reason, and not just theory. 

...the data is showing it’s time to lift. I would start slowly [open up schools sporting events] I think we need to open up the schools start getting kids back to the immune system you know and the major events the sporting events these are non-essential let’s get back to those slowly let’s start with schools let’s start with cafe Rio and the pizza place here… Does that make sense to you guys and I think I can go into Costco and I can shop with people and there’s probably a couple hundred people but I can’t go in Cafe Rio so big businesses are open little businesses are not….

Eventually we treat this like we treat flu. Which is if you have the flu and you’re feeling fever and body aches you just stay home if you have coughing or shortness of breath—COVID is more of a respiratory thing—you stay home. You don’t get tested, even when people come with flu a lot of times we don’t test them. We go, “you have flu. Here’s a medication.” You have COVID, go home, let it resolve and come back negative. 

If you have no symptoms you should be able to return to work. Are you an asymptomatic viral spreader? Maybe, but we can’t test all of humanity. Sure we’re gonna miss cases of coronavirus, just like we miss cases of the flu. It would be nice to capture every coronavirus patient, but is that realistic? Are we gonna keep the economy shut down for two years and vaccinate everybody? That’s an unrealistic expectation. You’re going to cause financial ruin, domestic violence, suicide, rape, violence and what are you going to get out of it? You’re still going to miss a lot of cases. So we need to treat this like the flu, which is familiar, and eventually this will mutate and become less and less virulent… 

I don’t need a double-blind clinically controlled trial to tell me if sheltering in place is appropriate, that is a college-level understanding of microbiology. A lot of times in medicine you have to make you have to make educated decisions with the data that you have. I can sit up in the 47th-floor in the penthouse and say we should do this, this, and this, but I haven’t seen a patient for 20 years—that’s not realistic. 

If you’re healthy and you don’t have significant comorbidities and you know you’re not immunodeficient and you’re not elderly you should be able to go out without any gloves and without a mask."

You have the free will to choose which narrative you find has the most validity.  Unfortunately, this is what happened to the video in question:

This is what YouTube/Google had to say about the reasons behind the removal of the video (which fortunately has appeared elsewhere on the YouTube website for the time-being):

"We quickly remove flagged content that violate our Community Guidelines, including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of local healthy authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance.  However, content that provides sufficient educational, documentary, scientific or artistic (EDSA) context is allowed -- for example, news coverage of this interview with additional context. From the very beginning of the pandemic, we’ve had clear policies against COVID-19 misinformation and are committed to continue providing timely and helpful information at this critical time."

Apparently, the virologists and epidemiologists at YouTube have decided that Doctor Erickson and Doctor Massih are simply not swallowing the pandemic KoolAid and must be silenced since their opinion is in opposition to that of the World Health Organization (aka Gates Foundation Health Organization).  This should really not be a surprise to anyone given these comments from YouTube's CEO Susan Wojcicki in late April 2020:

Video removal by YouTube has become part of controlling the unthinking masses in the post-2016 election period.

As it would appear, YouTube is not interested in scientific accuracy, it is more interested in promoting a certain narrative, that of the World Health Organization.  Why?  Who knows.

YouTube, Censorship and Our Technology Tyrant World

A recent posting on YouTube's Official Blog gives us a sense of the lengths that Google will go to to ensure that we are all protected from what the Google gods deem as "harmful content".  While the company admits to censoring content that violates its policies, they claim that they are "preserving the power of an open platform".

Google claims that YouTube is "built on the premise of openness" as shown in this quote from Susan Wojcicki, YouTube's Chief Executive Officer, on YouTube's Creator Blog:

"YouTube is built on the premise of openness. Based on this open platform, millions of creators around the world have connected with global audiences and many of them have built thriving businesses in the process. But openness comes with its challenges, which is why we also have Community Guidelines that we update on an ongoing basis. Most recently, this includes our hate speech policy and our upcoming harassment policy. When you create a place designed to welcome many different voices, some will cross the line. Bad actors will try to exploit platforms for their own gain, even as we invest in the systems to stop them. As more issues come into view, a rising chorus of policymakers, press and pundits are questioning whether an open platform is valuable... or even viable....

A commitment to openness is not easy. It sometimes means leaving up content that is outside the mainstream, controversial or even offensive. But I believe that hearing a broad range of perspectives ultimately makes us a stronger and more informed society, even if we disagree with some of those views. A large part of how we protect this openness is not just guidelines that allow for diversity of speech, but the steps that we’re taking to ensure a responsible community. I’ve said a number of times this year that this is my number one priority. A responsible approach toward managing what’s on our platform protects our users and creators like you. It also means we can continue to foster all the good that comes from an open platform."

Apparently, offensiveness is in the "eyes" of Google and the content that the company determines falls outside of its community policies. 

Google has created four principles that outline its approach to responsibility:

In the current posting on YouTube's Official Blog, Ms. Wojcicki focusses on "Remove".  The posting starts outlining improvements that Google/YouTube has made to removing inappropriate content since 2016:

The company claims that it walks a fine line between preserving free expression and protecting and promoting a vibrant community by enforcing its policies.  YouTube's quarterly Transparency Report for the months from April to June 2019 saw the following occur:

Since you cannot read the data, here it is with the percentage and total number of channels removed for each reason:

Spam, misleading and scams - 90.3% (3,676,012)

Nudity or sex - 6.3% (254,482)

Child safety - 1.8% (73,504)

Promotion of violence  extremism - 0.5% (18,831)

Hateful or abusive - 0.4% (17,818)

Harassment and cyberbullying - 0.4% (14,668)

Other - 0.1% (5,811)

When a channel is removed, all of its videos are removed; with the removal of just over 4 million channels, a total of 77,460,820 videos were removed.  Please note that these numbers do not include the channels/videos that were demonetized by Google meaning that the channel creators no longer make money from their YouTube video endeavours.  

Here is a graphic showing a breakdown of videos removed by reason for their removal:

The vast majority of videos that were removed violated YouTube's "spam, misleading and scams" rules.   While YouTube makes a really big deal about removing videos and channels that promote hate, in fact, these videos make up a very small portion of the total number of videos removed in the quarter.  In total, because of a breach of YouTube's hate speech rules, the company removed a total of 111,185 videos or 1.2 percent out of the total of 9,015,566 videos that were removed .   These videos appeared on more than 17,000 channels, five times the previous number of channels that were removed  thanks to YouTube's new rules regarding hate speech.

In addition to the removal of channels and videos, YouTube also uses a combination of people and technology to remove comments that video watchers make.  In the quarter between April and June 2019, a total of 537,759,344 comments were removed, 99.3 percent of which were automatically flagged and 0.7 percent of which were flagged by humans.  This is nearly twice the number of comments that were removed in the first quarter of 2019 thanks to an increase in hate speech removals. 

As I noted above, YouTube is relying heavily on machines to review and flag bad content.  Here is a quote from the report:

"In 2017, we expanded our use of machine learning technology to help detect potentially violative content and send it for human review. Machine learning is well-suited to detect patterns, which helps us to find content similar (but not exactly the same) to other content we’ve already removed, even before it’s ever viewed. These systems are particularly effective at flagging content that often looks the same — such as spam or adult content. Machines also can help to flag hate speech and other violative content, but these categories are highly dependent on context and highlight the importance of human review to make nuanced decisions. Still, over 87% of the 9 million videos we removed in the second quarter of 2019 were first flagged by our automated systems.

We’re investing significantly in these automated detection systems, and our engineering teams continue to update and improve them month by month. For example, an update to our spam detection systems in the second quarter of 2019 lead to a more than 50% increase in the number of channels we terminated for violating our spam policies."

Across Google's world, the company has hired in excess of 10,000 people to address content concerns.

It is quite interesting to note that all of this concern about content on Google's YouTube platform appeared after Hillary Clinton lost the election that she was destined to win in November 2016.  As users of Google's YouTube product, we have to trust that this massive and highly influential arm of America's technology tyrants is really looking out for our good, protecting us from the evil that lies out there just because they are so concerned about our welfare...but only since 2016.

YouTube Censorship in the Post-Truth Era

Recent developments from YouTube are particularly pertinent given that we live in a post-truth era.  On January 25, 2019, the following missive was posted on YouTube's official blog:

Note this paragraph:

"We’ll continue that work this year, including taking a closer look at how we can reduce the spread of content that comes close to—but doesn’t quite cross the line of—violating our Community Guidelines. To that end, we’ll begin reducing recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways—such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, claiming the earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11." (my bold)

While the author of the posting makes this version of censorship seem rather benign by invoking the "earth is flat" and other conspiracy themes, it is quite clear that Google is taking steps to ensure that the narrative on its YouTube product follows its own, internal guidelines to which the rest of us are not privy.  According to YouTube, the videos that will fall off of its "recommended" list will be "selected" based on both human and artificial intelligence (machine learning).  With YouTube's recommendation algorithm generating more than 70 percent (700 million human  hours) of YouTube's video views every day, its recommendations are extremely influential on its users.   According to Guillaime Chaslot, the Ex-Google engineer who helped to build the artificial intelligence that is used to curate the recommended videos and one of the people behind AlgoTransparency, YouTube's artificial intelligence is designed to increase the amount of time that people spend on the YouTube site because it leads to more ad clicks, Google's almost exclusive source of billions of dollars in annual income.  Here is Guillaume Chaslot's Twitter thread regarding the subject:

Here is quote from an article that he wrote for Medium in March 2017:

"YouTube search and YouTube recommendation algorithm yield surprisingly different results in these examples, despite both algorithms using the same data. This shows that small differences in the algorithms can yield large differences in the results. Search is probably optimized more towards relevance, whereas recommendations might take watch time more into account.

Surprisingly, one can notice that “likes” and “dislikes” on a video have little impact on recommendations. For instance, many videos claiming Michelle Obama was “born a man” have more dislikes than likes, but are still highly recommended by YouTube. YouTube seems to put more weight in maximizing watch time than likes.

Hence, if “the earth is flat” keeps users online longer than “the earth is round”, this theory will be favored by the recommendation algorithm.

Once a conspiracy video is favored by the A.I., it gives an incentive to content creators to upload additional videos corroborating the conspiracy. In turn, those additional videos increase the retention statistics of the conspiracy. Next, the conspiracy gets recommended further.  Eventually, the large amount of videos favoring a conspiracy makes it appear more credible. 

The point here is not to pass judgement on YouTube. They’re not doing this on purpose, it’s an unintended consequence of the algorithm. But every single day, people watch more than one billion hours of YouTube content.  And because YouTube has a large impact on what people watch, it could also have a lot of power in curbing the spread of alternative news, and the first step to finding a solution is to measure it." (my bolds)

Note the use of the word "alternative news", a rather interesting turn of phrase in this "fake news" era.        

Note that this new process will currently only affect a "very small" number of videos in the United States but that Google plays to cool this change out to more countries over time.  Using Google's own "less than one percent of the content on YouTube" claim and given that, according to Omnicore, there are over 5 billion videos shared on YouTube, one percent is still a roughly 50 million videos that will still be available to users but will not appear on its recommended list meaning that it will be far less likely that they will be viewed, truthful or not.

Truth really is in the eye of the beholder and even more so in this post-truth era.  In this case, truth is defined by Google.  Given that over 1.9 billion logged-in users visit YouTube every month and that every day, people watch more that a billion hours of video, YouTube's narrative on what is "borderline content" and "alternative news" is highly influential.