After Facebook and Twitter, YouTube has announced now that it would not be banning politicians from using the platform even if the content is in violation of its community guidelines.
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki was briefing the media about how the platform approaches political figures when she made this announcement at the Atlantic Festival on September 25.
As per a Politico report, Wojcicki said that news outlets would report on speeches and incidents and provide context to it regardless of whether they have been taken down on YouTube or not.
“When you have a political officer that is making information that is really important for their constituents to see, or for other global leaders to see. That is content that we would spare because we think it’s important for other people to see,” the CEO of the video-sharing platform added.
Just a day ago, Facebook’s global affairs chief Nick Clegg had made similar announcements at the same festival. He said,“We (at Facebook) are champions of free speech and defend it in the face of attempts to restrict it. Censoring or stifling political discourse would be at odds with what we are about.”
Twitter, however, has adopted a slightly different approach. While they won’t be banning politicians for contentious content either over the same concerns, they would label such posts as rule-breaking.
Discussions on the need to monitor what politicians post became the cause celebre after President Trump used inflammatory language in several of his tweets. All the three widely used social media platforms have come under the scanner of netizens and journalists alike as content spread on these platforms, which is often misleading in nature, have been known to incite violence in the past.
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