YouTube announced Tuesday that it will start removing false claims
about cancer treatments as part of an ongoing effort to build out its
medical misinformation policy.
Under the updated policy, YouTube will prohibit “content that
promotes cancer treatments proven to be harmful or ineffective, or
content that discourages viewers from seeking professional medical
treatment,” Dr. Garth Graham, head of YouTube Health, said in a blog
post Tuesday.
“This includes content that promotes unproven treatments in place
of approved care or as a guaranteed cure, and treatments that have been
specifically deemed harmful by health authorities,” he said, such as the
misleading claim that patients should “take vitamin C instead of
radiation therapy.”
The update is just one of several steps YouTube has made in recent
years to build out its medical misinformation policy, which also
prohibits false claims about vaccines and abortions, as well as content that promotes or glorifies eating disorders.
As part of the announcement, YouTube is rolling out a broader
updated medical misinformation policy framework that will consider
content in three categories: prevention, treatment and denial.
“To determine if a condition, treatment or substance is in scope
of our medical misinformation policies, we’ll evaluate whether it’s
associated with a high public health risk, publicly available guidance
from health authorities around the world, and whether it’s generally
prone to misinformation,” Graham said. He added that YouTube will take
action on content that falls into that framework and “contradicts local
health authorities or the World Health Organization.”
Graham said the policy is designed to preserve “the important
balance of removing egregiously harmful content while ensuring space for
debate and discussion.”
Cancer treatment fits YouTube’s updated medical misinformation
framework because the disease poses a high public health risk and is a
topic prone to frequent misinformation, and because there is “stable
consensus about safe cancer treatments from local and global health
authorities,” Graham said.
As with many social media policies, however, the challenge often
isn’t introducing it but enforcing it. YouTube says its restrictions on
cancer treatment misinformation will go into effect on Tuesday and
enforcement will ramp up in the coming weeks. The company has previously
said it uses both human and automated moderation to review videos and
their context.
YouTube also plans to promote cancer-related content from the Mayo Clinic and other authoritative sources.
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