Say Goodbye to Health Myths: YouTube Takes Aim at Misleading Medical Advice, but Some Controversial Clips Stay!

On Tuesday, Alphabet Inc's GOOG GOOGL video-sharing platform, YouTube, unveiled a fresh strategy to tackle medical misinformation on its platform, as detailed in a recent blog post.

The platform plans to restructure its guidelines into three main pillars: prevention, treatment, and denial. 

This shift will see the removal of content that goes against widely accepted health advice on subjects like Covid-19, reproductive health, cancer, and harmful substances, among others.

YouTube emphasized, "While specific medical guidance can change over time as we learn more, our goal is to ensure that when it comes to areas of well-studied scientific consensus, YouTube is not a platform for distributing information that could harm people."

To decide if a topic aligns with its new medical policy, YouTube will evaluate its public health risk and its susceptibility to misinformation. 

For example, cancer-related information, which many seek on platforms like YouTube, will be scrutinized. 

Content that either deters from proven treatments or endorses unverified ones will face removal.

However, YouTube clarified that some content, even if it breaches the new policy, might stay online if deemed in the public's interest. For instance, statements by politicians challenging official health recommendations or public discussions containing false data may not be deleted. 

In such cases, YouTube aims to provide added context for its audience.