YouTube offers ‘re-education’ for rule breakers

YouTube announced Tuesday it will begin offering re-education to content creators who violate the company’s policies and will grant clemency to those who complete the course.

Until this week, YouTube creators who break the rules have been subject to the company’s “three strikes” policy in which they receive a warning before each strike and are booted off the platform after three strikes. 

But the video streaming giant is now offering creators who receive a warning a chance to redeem themselves by taking re-education courses in which they will be taught how to better comply with YouTube’s rules. Those who take the classes and remain compliant for the next ninety days will not receive a strike on their record.

“Starting today, creators will have the option of taking an educational training course when they receive a Community Guidelines warning,” YouTube wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “These resources will provide new ways for creators to understand how they can avoid uploading content that violates our policies in the future. Completion of the course will lift the warning from a creator’s channel — so long as they don’t violate the same policy for 90 days.”

The company says most content creators upload content to the platform “in good faith” and believes “educational efforts are successful at reducing the number of creators who unintentionally violate our policies.”

“Most creators are good and they actually want to comply with our policies if they knew,” said YouTube VP of Product Development Jennifer Flannery O’Connor in a video explaining the new policy. “Most creators are good and want to play by the rules,” she added.

Creators who have already been de-platformed, however, will still not be allowed back.

“If you violated our policies three times and your channel was terminated this is not going to provide you a path back to YouTube,” said Flannery O’Conner.

The re-education initiative comes amid an expansion of YouTube’s “medical misinformation” policy, which will now apply to cancer and other maladies.

“We’re taking what we’ve learned so far about the most effective ways to tackle medical misinformation to simplify our approach for creators, viewers, and partners,” YouTube wrote in a blog post.

While acknowledging that science “can change over time as we learn more,” the platform said it will follow “scientific consensus,” an oxymoronic euphemism for government guidance.

This includes non-government science on cancer, YouTube clarified.

Starting today and ramping up in the coming weeks, we will begin removing content that promotes cancer treatments proven to be harmful or ineffective, or content that discourages viewers from seeking professional medical treatment. This includes content that promotes unproven treatments in place of approved care or as a guaranteed cure, and treatments that have been specifically deemed harmful by health authorities. For instance, a video that claims ‘garlic cures cancer,’ or ‘take vitamin C instead of radiation therapy’ would be removed.

In addition to suppressing such information, YouTube is teaming up with Mayo Clinic to publish a “playlist of engaging, informative cancer-related videos from a range of authoritative sources.”

Any content which “contradicts local health authorities or the World Health Organization (WHO)” will be sorted into three categories: misinformation on how to prevent maladies, misinformation about treatments, and content which “disputes the existence of specific health conditions.”

However, YouTube may allow the content if it is in the “public interest”:

This means that we may allow content that is sufficiently in the public interest to remain on YouTube, even if it otherwise violates our policies – for example, a video of a public hearing or comments made by national political candidates on the campaign trail that disputes health authority guidance, or graphic footage from active warzones or humanitarian crises. We may also make exceptions for personal testimonies or content that discusses the results of a specific medical study.