YouTube has been criticised for failing to remove a video wrongly claiming that Donald Trump won Tuesday’s US presidential election, despite acknowledging it contains demonstrably false information.
The Google-owned site has instead disabled adverts on the video, produced by the far-right TV channel One America News Network. A spokesperson said: “We remove ads from videos that contain content that is demonstrably false about election results, like this video.”
The video, which has been viewed almost 400,000 times since it was posted on Wednesday, opens with the channel’s anchor, Christina Bobb, declaring: “President Trump won four more years in office last night.”
Bobb goes on to say that a number of states where the voting has yet to be completed, including Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, are “all Trump’s … This is a decisive victory for Trump”. She accuses the “Democrat leadership” of Pennsylvania and Michigan of stopping the vote counts, because “they need time to find more ballots”.
Bobb then accuses Democrats of “tossing Republican votes” and “harvesting fake ballots”. The video goes on to call on conservatives to “fight back against corruption”, by calling up their state representatives and demanding they “finish the tally and give the American people the result”.
YouTube has strong policies against election interference, but almost all of them cease to apply once votes have been cast, the company said. “Our community guidelines prohibit content misleading viewers about voting, for example content aiming to mislead voters about the time, place, means or eligibility requirements for voting, or false claims that could materially discourage voting,” a spokesperson told the Guardian. “The content of this video doesn’t rise to that level.”
“All search results and videos about this election – including this video – surface an information panel noting that election results may not be final, and we are continuing to raise up authoritative content in search results and recommendations. We will continue to be vigilant in the post-election period.”
While Facebook and Twitter have enacted wide-ranging policies in an attempt to prevent premature claims of victory, Google’s response has been muted. The company pulled all political advertising once polls closed, in an effort to prevent its ad platform from being used to promote such propaganda, but resisted calls to ban it in user-generated content.
The company has also faced criticism for providing advertising services to far-right news sites such as Gateway Pundit, which are promoting claims of electoral fraud. “Misinformation sites like Gateway Pundit are now citing fabricated stats of voter turnout to undermine trust in the election results,” said the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, a campaign group. “Unbelievably, Google is still placing ads on these sites, profiting from these falsehoods.”
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