Fake News and disinformation: two of the plagues that, today, we find it hard to recognize. In a historical moment in which almost all of the population is closed at home and is informed via the internet, it is easy to come across fake news. YouTube wants to fight fake news and disinformation because it is aware of being one of the most important and followed channels in the world. The company itself explains how does and how it will do in the future with i new Piani.
YouTube is exploring new ways to combat disinformation and fake news. Here are the future plans of Google's video platform
For YouTube there is already a combat plan against disinformation and fake news called Remove, Raise, Reduce and Reward. The so-called 4 R of YouTube they allow, thanks to algorithms and sometimes thanks to the human presence, to recognize contents classifiable as unsuitable and delete them. On the contrary, those considered as valid come rewarded, mostly with visibility on the platform itself. Go for the human presence, but the algorithms must be continuously updated.
This happens because the content creators who have the sole purpose of making money with fake news and information, disguise their video content by covering it with valid material. Basically, valid material is mixed with invalid material. The algorithm calculates that there is a share that does not undermine the internal rules of the platform e let it pass the content.
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In the future, YouTube will fight disinformation and fake news through three methods:
- fake news block before they go viral: to do this, it will specifically focus on sending alerts informing users of the poor quality of the content they are viewing
- some videos can go viral via the sharing of integrated links: YouTube is considering blocking such sharing in some cases as very often these links share insignificant or even harmful information
- the method that we think is more valid is thehiring staff who can translateand (not through machine learning therefore) news coming from the world in other languages. Fake news very often comes due to bad information, positioning of texts and images in wrong contexts and so on. To avoid this, human intervention is required
In our view, the only way to combat disinformation is for YouTube it is not so much relying on Artificial Intelligence as on that of man and its ability to discern false news in the midst of the "heap" of information coming from the world.
