YouTube has loosened its content moderation policies

YouTube has relaxed its moderation policies and is now instructing reviewers not to remove content that might violate its rules if they’re in the “public interest,” according to a report from The New York Times. The platform reportedly adjusted its policies internally in December, offering examples that included medical misinformation and hate speech.

In training material viewed by the Times, YouTube says reviewers should now leave up videos in the public interest — which includes discussions of elections, ideologies, movements, race, gender, sexuality, abortion, immigration, censorship — if no more than half of their content breaks its rules, up from one quarter. The platform said in the material that the move expands on a change made before the 2024 US election, which allows content from political candidates to stay up even if they violate its community guidelines under its exception for educational, documentary, scientific, and artistic content (EDSA).

Additionally, the platform told moderators that they should remove content if “freedom of expression value may outweigh harm risk,” and take borderline videos to a manager instead of removing them, the Times reports.

“We regularly update our Community Guidelines to adapt to the content we see on YouTube,“ YouTube spokesperson Nicole Bell said in an emailed statement to The Verge. Bell added that EDSA exceptions only “apply to a small fraction” of videos on the platform.

“This practice allows us to prevent, for example, an hours-long news podcast from being removed for showing one short clip of violence,” Bell said. “We regularly update our guidance for these exceptions to reflect the new types of discussion and content (for example emergence of long, podcast content) that we see on the platform, and the feedback of our global creator community.”

As noted by the Times, YouTube showed reviewers real examples of how it has implemented the new policy. One video contained coverage of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s covid vaccine policy changes — under the title “RFK Jr. Delivers SLEDGEHAMMER Blows to Gene-Altering JABS” — and was allowed to violate policies surrounding medical misinformation because public interest “outweighs the harm risk,” according to the Times. (The video has since been taken off the platform, but the Times says the reasoning behind this is “unclear.”) Another example was a 43-minute video about Trump’s cabinet appointees that violated YouTube’s harassment rules with a slur targeting a transgender person, but was left up because it had only a single violation, the Times reports.

YouTube also reportedly told reviewers to leave up a video from South Korea that mentioned putting former president Yoon Suk Yeol in a guillotine, saying that the “wish for execution by guillotine is not feasible.”

Update, June 9th: Added a statement from YouTube.