YouTube bans anti-vaccine contents from platform

Video-sharing platform, YouTube, has announced an expansion in its misinformation policies, aimed at banning anti-vaccine contents on the platform.

In a post on the company’s official blog yesterday, it was reported that since last year, the platform had had to take down “over 130,000 videos for violating our COVID-19 vaccine policies.”

“We’ve steadily seen false claims about the coronavirus vaccines spill over into misinformation about vaccines in general, and we’re now at a point where it’s more important than ever to expand the work we started with COVID-19 to other vaccines,” the post read.

The policy will specifically target “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.”

However the company, considering the importance of scientific discussions and debates, said the policies will allow content about vaccine policies, new vaccine trials, and historical vaccine successes, or failures.