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Covid-related misinformation on YouTube: The spread of misinformation videos on social media and the effectiveness of platform policies
18 September 2020
Summary
For this memo, we identified all Covid-related videos which circulated on social media, but which YouTube eventually removed because they contained false information. Between October, 2019 and June, 2020 there were 8,105 such videos – less than 1% of all YouTube videos about the coronavirus. We find that:
- It took YouTube on average 41 days to remove videos containing false information, based on a subset of videos for which this data was available.
- Surprisingly, Covid-related misinformation videos do not find their audience through YouTube itself, but largely by being shared on Facebook.
- Facebook placed warning labels about false information only on 55 videos, less than 1% of the misinformation videos shared on the platform.
- Misinformation videos were shared almost 20 million times on social media, which is more than the shares gathered by the five largest English-language news sources on YouTube combined (CNN, ABC News, BBC, Fox News and Al Jazeera).
Aleksi Knuutila, Aliaksandr Herasimenka, Hubert Au, Jonathan Bright & Philip N. Howard. “COVID-related misinformation on YouTube: The spread of misinformation videos on social media and the effectiveness of platform policies.” COMPROP Data Memo 2020.6, 21.09.2020. Oxford, UK: Project on Computational Propaganda. demtech.oii.ox.ac.uk