YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter say they will join forces with fact-checkers, governments, and researchers to tackle COVID-19 vaccine conspiracies from January
Each platform has been building its own machinery in the meantime — YouTube extended its fact-check panels beyond the US to Germany and the UK in September, and Twitter committed weeks later to removing harmful vaccine tweets outright. What changes here is that the three biggest video and social players are pooling fact-checkers, governments, and researchers rather than acting alone.
First-order effects
Vaccine conspiracy content on all three platforms faces coordinated enforcement from January, with fact-checkers and researchers gaining a direct pipeline into moderation decisions at YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.
Second-order effects
Smaller platforms that signed the March statement but lack in-house fact-checking networks face pressure to adopt similar partnerships or become the residual home for removed vaccine conspiracies.
Third-order effects
Whether this holds depends on execution: by early 2022, over 80 fact-checking organizations were telling YouTube's CEO its policies were proving insufficient — evidence that platform-fact-checker coalitions tend to produce labeling infrastructure faster than they change what gets recommended.
The trend: Platform moderation is shifting from unilateral content rules toward standing coalitions of platforms, fact-checkers, and governments — with the gap between announced coordination and measurable enforcement becoming the recurring fault line.
Here's what happened when I posted our latest @spectator article to Facebook - I'm aware this is happening to others - what has happened to academic freedom and freedom of speech? There is nothing in this article that is ‘false’ https://twitter.com/...
Are you aware @nick_clegg that Facebook has censored a post by one of the most rigorous and brilliant analysts of the Covid pandemic? Not some crank. @carlheneghan is Professor of Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford. Shocking censorship.
So the Professor of EVIDENCE BASED medicine at Oxford is censored by Facebook. For sharing EVIDENCE. Heads must roll. @FacebookWatch https://twitter.com/...
This is a very dangerous direction of travel with respect to what science actually is; our freedom of expression, diversity of thought, and democratic norms, irrespective of what anyone thinks about Covid-19. https://twitter.com/...
#Facebook CEO and all Management, need to be indicted and deserve long jail sentences because their corp misinformation & censorship is actually putting lives at risk, and even costing lives... https://twitter.com/...
Prof @carlheneghan, director of the University of Oxford's Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine writes an article about a peer-reviewed study published in a prestigious medical journal. But Facebook's “fact-checkers” have the incredible audacity of censoring it. Unbelievable... htt…
This is what happens when Her Majesty's Opposition apply pressure to social media companies to censor dissent from public health orthodoxy. Happy now, @JonAshworth? https://twitter.com/...
“Three of the largest social networks have said they will join forces with fact-checkers, governments and researchers to try to come up with a new way of tackling misinformation.” https://www.bbc.co.uk/...
December will be Christmas for conspiracy theorists. Here's an example of tech companies trying to fight misinformation around Covid vaccines. But their sites (including this one) are already full of it https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
Oh wait. I think we have a late entrant in rubbish stock images of the COVID-19 vaccine. In this edition, the photographer was clearly in a rush to get the vaccine out, judging by the handwritten label https://www.bbc.co.uk/...