Heena Sharma Blog

A year ago, Susan Wojcicki was on stage to defend YouTube . Her company, hammered for months for fueling falsehoods online, was reeling from another flare-up involving a conspiracy theory video about the Parkland, Florida high school shooting that suggested the victims were “crisis actors.” Wojcicki, YouTube’s chief executive officer, is a reluctant public ambassador, but she was in Austin at the South by Southwest conference to unveil a solution that she hoped would help quell conspiracy theories: a tiny text box from websites like Wikipedia that would sit below videos that questioned well-established facts like the moon landing and link viewers to the truth. Wojcicki’s media behemoth, bent on overtaking television, is estimated to rake in sales of more than $16 billion a year. But on that day, Wojcicki compared her video site to a different kind of institution. “We’re really more like a library,” she said, staking out a familiar position as a defender of free speech. “There

Google-owned video sharing platform YouTube has announced that it will no longer recommend videos that "come close to" violating its community guidelines, such as conspiracy or medically inaccurate videos. The video sharing platform will no longer recommend videos "claiming the earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11", NBC News reported on Monday. The original blog post from YouTube, published on January 25, said videos the site recommends, usually after a user has viewed one, would no longer lead to similar videos and instead would "pull in recommendations from a wider set of topics". YouTube said in the post that the action is meant to "reduce the spread of content that comes close to - but doesn't quite cross the line of - violating" its community policies. The change will not affect the videos' availability. And if users have subscribed to a channel that, for instance, produces c