“We believe it’s important to connect people to content from authoritative sources regarding health topics, and we continuously review our policies and products as real world events unfold,” YouTube spokesperson Elena Hernandez said in a statement.
TikTok recently began removing abortion-related videos that violate its policy against medical misinformation, including those that share potentially dangerous advice about how to self-induce an abortion.
Under the new, global misinformation policy, YouTube will remove content that promotes or provides instructions for “unsafe or alternative” abortion methods that are not supported by health authorities. It will also remove misinformation related to the safety of abortion, such as the false claim that abortions have a high risk of causing infertility.
YouTube will also start attaching an information panel to all abortion-related content and search results to point users to credible information from health authorities, such as the US National Library of Medicine.
As with many social media policies, however, the challenge isn’t introducing it but enforcing it. YouTube said its enforcement systems around the new abortion misinformation policy will ramp up in the coming weeks and months.
