YouTube has disabled anti-vaccination ads.

A month ago, YouTube announced that it plans to exclude conspiracy theories from the list of recommendations. On the one hand, it violates the freedom of speech. On the other hand, YouTube has the right to set its own rules, since it is a commercial service.

Now the company has confirmed its line and went even further. She generally turned off advertising on channels dedicated to the harm of vaccines and vaccinations . According to YouTube, these materials violate the rules prohibiting the monetization of video with “dangerous and harmful” content.

Thus, “anti-vaccination agents” lose an important source of funding and there is hope that some of them will curtail their activities.

In fairness, we must admit that YouTube in this case is not so much fighting for justice, as follows the opinion of advertisers and the public. Recently, there has been a discussion about why advertising of famous brands appears in anti-vaccination videos. After all, if you hold a logical chain, then these materials are related to the deaths of thousands of people who died due to the rejection of measles and other diseases. Concerned advertisers began to shoot ads from these videos, writes BuzzFeed. Among the companies that have been asked to turn off advertising in anti-vaccination videos are jewelry company Brilliant Earth, software developer SolarWinds, Vitacost, a vitamin store and marijuana manufacturer CWCBExpo.
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Noticing such a trend, YouTube decided to completely disable advertising for anti-vaccination agents.

“We have strict rules that regulate in which videos advertisements are allowed. Anti-vaccination content videos violate these rules, a YouTube spokesman said. “We are actively applying this policy, and if we find a video that violates it, we will immediately take action and remove the advertisement.”

An earlier study showed that YouTube produces correct results for requests such as "vaccine safety" (links to materials from children's hospitals and other medical institutions, etc.), but then obscurantism begins in the list of recommendations for further viewing: often there are videos anti-vaccination with headlines like "Mom studied information about vaccinations, was horrified and wrote a refusal."



Seven different advertisers said they did not know about placing their ads in such videos and appealed to YouTube to stop this outrage. We are talking about a number of channels against vaccinations, including VAXXED TV, LarryCook333 (supporters of the StopMandatoryVaccinations_com movement), and iHealthTube. Since then, YouTube has banned advertising on all these channels.

In addition to removing ads, YouTube introduced a special information panel for anti-vaccination channels with a link to the “Anti-vaccinationism” wiki page. Such a panel was previously shown only on anti-vaccination videos, where measles, mumps and rubella vaccines were mentioned, and now its action has been extended to a longer list of vaccinations.

Larry Cook, the leader of the anti-vaccination movement StopMandatoryVaccinations, confirmed in his Facebook that his entire channel was demonetized, and YouTube didn’t even contact him and didn’t report the changes: a thriving demographic group who believe in alternative medicine, holistic health, and natural medicines, Cook said. “Closing monetization on alternative medicine channels simply means that advertisers will go elsewhere to reach their target audience.”

After an outbreak of measles in the US last week, Congressman Adam Schiff demanded that Facebook and Google consider the risks of spreading medical disinformation about vaccines on their platforms. Facebook responded that it would “take measures to reduce the spread of health-related misinformation on Facebook.” Google recalled the efforts of a cardinal algorithmic struggle with all conspiracy theories on YouTube: “Like many algorithmic changes, these changes in the recommendation system will be gradual, and their accuracy will be refined over time,” said a Google spokesman.

The World Health Organization has called anti-vaccination activity "one of the 10 global threats of 2019" to the health and lives of people. According to the WHO , in the first half of 2018 more than 41 thousand people in Europe became infected with measles: more than in any year of the previous decade. Computer modeling showed that a 5% decrease in the number of vaccinated children leads to a threefold increase in the incidence .