With so many users around the world coming to YouTube to learn about political leaders, participate in civic engagement, and develop informed opinions about current events, we have a responsibility to support an informed citizenry and foster healthy political discourse. To deliver on this responsibility, we remove policy-violative content, raise authoritative news sources, reduce the spread of election-related misinformation, and provide a range of resources for civics partners such as government officials, candidates, civics organizations, and political Creators to ensure a broad range of voices are heard.
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How does YouTube remove policy violative election-related content?
Our Community Guidelines provide clear guidance on content that is not allowed on YouTube, including established policies prohibiting hate speech, harassment, deceptive practices, and incitement to violence. Our policies include election-related content, and we enforce these policies consistently, regardless of who creates it. We use a combination of people and machine learning to detect potentially problematic content at scale, and when we identify such content, human review verifies whether it violates our policies. If it does, the content is removed and is used to train our machines for better coverage in the future.
Here are some examples of where our established Community Guidelines apply to election-related content:
- Content that has been technically manipulated or doctored in a way that misleads users (beyond clips taken out of context) and may pose a serious risk of egregious harm; for example, a video that has been technically manipulated to make it appear that a government official is dead.
- Content that aims to mislead people about voting or the census processes, like telling viewers an incorrect voting date.
- Content that advances false claims related to the technical eligibility requirements for current political candidates and sitting elected officials to serve in office, such as false claims that a candidate is not eligible to hold office based on false information about citizenship status requirements to hold office in that country.
- Content that contains hacked information, the disclosure of which may interfere with democratic processes, such as elections and censuses. For example, videos that contain hacked information about a political candidate shared with the intent to interfere in an election.
- Content encouraging others to interfere with democratic processes, such as obstructing or interrupting voting procedures. For example, telling viewers to create long voting lines with the purpose of making it harder for others to vote.
- Content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of any past U.S. presidential election.
Additionally, we terminate channels that:
- Attempt to impersonate another person or channel, misrepresent their country of origin, or conceal their association with a government actor.
- Artificially increase the number of views, likes, comments, or other metrics either through the use of automatic systems or by serving up videos to unsuspecting viewers.
Content providing sufficient educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic context is allowed on YouTube. As always, we enforce our policies consistently, without regard to a video’s political viewpoint.
How does YouTube combat foreign interference in electoral processes?
To combat foreign and domestic coordinated influence operations looking to interfere in electoral processes, we coordinate closely with Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) to identify bad actors and terminate their channels and accounts. Through TAG, we work with other technology companies to share intelligence and best practices, and share threat information with law enforcement.
How does YouTube give viewers access to authoritative election-related news and information?
Political news and events can be subject to misinformation, so the availability of quality information sources is crucial. That’s why we raise up authoritative voices, including news sources like CNN and Fox News, for news and information in search results and “Up next” panels.
We also have a number of product features that help highlight content across our platform, including Top News and Breaking News shelves to highlight quality journalism, as well as information panels that indicate funding sources below videos from publishers that receive public or government funding. We also have fact check information panels that provide context from third-party fact-checked articles above search results for relevant queries—including specific claims about the elections.
Alongside our always-on product features that raise information from authoritative sources on our platform, we adopt further measures during key civics and election moments. For instance, when there are major live moments — like the State of the Union, Election Day and the Presidential Inauguration — we work to make these streams easily accessible to a wide audience on our platform.
For the 2020 U.S. elections, we introduced a suite of information panels to provide additional context related to the elections – including information on candidates, voting, and elections results.
What YouTube tools and resources are available to civics partners such as government officials, candidates, civics organizations, and political Creators?
YouTube has a range of tools and resources to help civics partners build their brands and connect with constituents. We’ve created a series of guides to get them started.
- Global Getting Started Guide for Civics – Discover a set of best practices and examples for civic partners to build their channel from the ground up, including sections on branding, content planning, content creation, and content discovery.
- Live Streaming Guide for Civics – Learn how civic partners are able to communicate effectively with their community live on YouTube, including details about hosting live events, press conferences, and real-time interactions with audiences – and explore hardware and software options to help them make the most of their live streams.
How does YouTube treat political advertising?
Given the importance of shared trust in the democratic process, we want to improve voters’ confidence in the political ads they may see on our ad platforms. We enforce all of our guidelines consistently and without regard to a video’s political viewpoint.
Ads running on YouTube are subject to Google Ads policies, content that lives on our platform are subject to YouTube Community Guidelines, and channels that are part of the YouTube Partner Program are subject to YouTube Monetization policies. So a video uploaded to a YouTube channel by a Creator is subject to our Community Guidelines, but if that same video is promoted as an ad, it’s further subject to Google Ad policies.
Google’s ads policies govern ads that run on YouTube. We don’t allow granular microtargeting (including non-political ads). Verified US political advertisers can only target election ads on age, gender, location (e.g. postal code), and context (e.g. topics). Clear disclosures are required for all election ads to help you better understand who is paying for them – data which is publicly available in our Transparency Report. We use both automated and human reviewers to check our policies are being followed.
YouTube’s Community Guidelines specify what content is allowed and not allowed on YouTube, and we have policies that have been specifically created for elections. Policies that directly relate to elections include:
- Voter suppression
- Suppression of census participation
- False candidate eligibility claims
- Impersonation
- Hate and harassment
- Spam, deceptive practices, and scams
YouTube’s Monetization policies apply to creators who are part of the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) to adopt monetization products to earn money for their channel. Participating channels have to meet eligibility requirements as well as follow our monetization policies and advertiser friendly content guidelines. Failure to do so means limited or no ads will appear against content.
How does YouTube treat ads with political content in different parts of the world?
Political Creators interested in becoming verified to run ads with political content will need to learn more about political advertising requirements in your country.