In a statement, YouTube said licensed health professionals on YouTube can now apply to add panels to their videos that mark themselves as reliable sources of health information. They will also be able to add videos to their health content section that compiles information about specific medical conditions.
Licensed doctors, nurses, psychologists, marriage and family therapists and social workers will benefit from this feature. YouTube will verify applicants’ licenses before accepting them. They will have to agree to follow best practices for sharing health information established by the Council of Medical Specialty Societies, the National Academy of Medicine, and the World Health Organization, which state that information should be science-based, objective, transparent and fair. YouTube said it will be periodically re-evaluated to ensure users accepted into the program still meet the criteria.
Previously, only organizations such as public health departments and hospitals had access to these features. “This new step will allow us to expand to include high-quality information from a broader set of healthcare channels,” Garth Graham, global head of health and public health partnerships at YouTube, said in a blog post announcing the change.
In an interview with The Verge earlier this month, Graham said that YouTube is working to increase the volume of reliable health information on the platform: “I think we need to combat medical misinformation by removing or reducing what’s visible. But people still have questions and are looking for answers. So you have to make sure you have enough sources of information that allow people to interact appropriately.”
While YouTube has struggled to manage misinformation, especially medical misinformation, it hasn’t been a huge success. For example, it is clear that it has become a major source of misinformation about Covid and the Covid vaccine. Highlighting what YouTube considers good information is one way to improve the mix of healthcare content, but it’s not yet clear whether it will be enough to prevent the bad or wrong.
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