The company’s new strategy will be slowly rolled out in India over the coming months.
Video platform YouTube will begin cracking down on “egregious clickbait content” over the coming months, its parent company Google has said.
According to a post by Google on its India Blog (18 December), egregious clickbait occurs when the video’s title or thumbnail makes claims that do not match the content of the video.
Examples given include a video that is titled ‘The president resigned’ but the video doesn’t contain any information about the president’s resignation, or a thumbnail that contains the phrase ‘top political news’ on a video that doesn’t include any news coverage.
Google said that the platform’s crackdown is “especially important” in cases when the video covers topics such as breaking news or current events to ensure that viewers aren’t misled about what they watch on YouTube.
The company will be slowly rolling out this new plan in India over the coming months. As part of the enforcement, it will remove any offending videos without issuing a strike against the creator of the channel at the beginning of this programme.
“To ensure creators have time to adjust to these enforcement updates, we’ll start by removing content that violates this policy without issuing a strike, and as we continue to educate creators, our enforcement efforts will prioritise new video uploads moving forward.”
However, at present, it is unknown how exactly YouTube plans to categorise videos covering news or current events.
A research paper published last year found that clickbait is featured heavily on all kinds of social media, especially YouTube where there is a strong financial incentive to do so.
It found that clickbait content constitutes nearly 50pc of content from mainstream broadcast media and US-based companies spent an average of almost 10pc of their advertising budget on clickbait content.
Earlier this year, Coimisiún na Meán, Ireland’s media regulator, listed YouTube among the 10 platforms which will have to follow its new Online Safety Code. The code means the video-sharing platforms are obligated to protect users, especially minors from harmful content.
YouTube has been making efforts to reduce misleading content. In October, the platform announced that it would slowly roll out labels which note whether a video has been digitally altered using GenAI. Although a promising idea, triggering these labels takes specific tools, which means that users will not see widespread use for some time.
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