YouTube removed more than 10,000 videos related to midterms

YouTube took down more than 10,000 videos related to the U.S. midterm elections for violating its policies on election integrity and other guidelines, with 75% removed before they reached 100 views, the division of Alphabet’s Google said on Monday.

“We enforced our policies regardless of a speaker’s public figure status or their political viewpoint, and regardless of the language the content was in,” Leslie Miller, YouTube’s vice president of government affairs and public policy, wrote in a blog post.

“We’ll apply learnings from these U.S. midterms to our ongoing work supporting the integrity of elections around the world.”

The hugely popular video site and other social media companies have been under pressure since the 2016 U.S. presidential election to ensure their platforms are not manipulated to spread political misinformation.

YouTube published its results now that the Georgia runoff earlier this month has concluded.

YouTube said it removed content that went against rules forbidding users from deceiving people about how to vote, encouraging violence and promoting misinformation, such as the falsehood that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was stolen.

The video platform also said that over 85% of its algorithmically driven video recommendations on midterm-related topics came from authoritative news sources across multiple languages, including English and Spanish, from outlets such as Univision and NBC News.