To better moderate its videos, YouTube will call on the strength of the community, as Twitter already does.
A few weeks before the takeover by Elon Musk, Twitter implemented a rather popular and increasingly used function: community notes. They allow you to display a contextualized text to annotate or correct a person’s publication, without asking for their consent. A maneuver which helps to stem false information, even if community notes are sometimes diverted from their primary purpose.
It is now Google that would like to take inspiration from this initiative for its platform which is closest to a social network: YouTube.
Is this video a parody?
Google warns that this is currently an experimental function and only in the United States, in English and on mobile. This is a first pilot phase to test the system and collect feedback.
Google will therefore invite a first wave of YouTube users to invite them to write notes under the videos. As on Twitter, the goal is to adopt neutral language and indicate sources to add context to something said in the video. Internet users will be able, for example, to indicate whether a video is in reality a parody, or if, on the contrary, it is trying to spread false information.
On Twitter, this function has sometimes been abused. In particular to criticize the comments of political figures without really understanding the extract pointed out. Since the note appears on the basis of group mobilization, its diversion is simpler in highly mobilized environments.
It remains to be seen how Google intends to moderate its own system. We imagine that the service should become more widespread in the coming months.
