John, YouTube has just decided to give a free pass to election deniers.
They’ve decided to END their policy against promoting Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 elections – instead letting 2020 election denialism run rampant.
The last time the Big Lie was left unchecked online, disinformation and election denialism fed the violence that culminated in the January 6th attack on our democracy.
It’s unacceptable and dangerous – and rescinding this policy right before the 2024 election cycle could be a disaster for our democracy.
Tell YouTube: We must take election disinformation seriously. YouTube should reinstate their existing policy and continue to combat election denialism on the platform.
Lies about the 2020 election led to a massive wave of political violence, threats, and harassment directed towards election officials and volunteer poll workers – the very people who are ensuring our elections run smoothly.
But this decision to roll back a commonsense policy against election lies shows that social media platforms like YouTube failed to learn from the 2020 elections – and are woefully unprepared to stop election deniers and disinformation.
It’s not just YouTube. Our Social Media Monitoring team spends every Election Day tracking blatant, evidence-free attempts to convince people their votes don’t count or that we can’t trust election officials – and raises them to social media platform officials to delete.
But the response we’ve received hasn’t been enough. We, along with 120 other groups, called on social media platforms before the 2022 elections to make specific policy changes to help moderate election lies. Instead, they’ve continued allowing harmful content to continue to spread – to say nothing of right-wing sites like Gab and Parler that are designed to spread disinformation. [1]
Social media platforms cannot continue to put profit over corporate responsibility and democracy itself. We must send a clear message that consumers – and our democracy – deserve better from our social media platforms.
Add your name if you agree: Social media platforms have an obligation to their users to moderate the content on their sites and prevent election misinformation. YouTube must strengthen its policies against election lies – not roll them back.
Thanks for all you do,
Emma Steiner, Disinformation Analyst
and the team at Common Cause
[1] https://www.commoncause.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Coalition-letter-for-2022-mid-terms-1.pdf
