YouTube will soon test a feature that will allow users to add notes below videos to correct inaccurate or misleading information, according to an announcement from the video-sharing platform on Monday. And although it sounds surprisingly similar to X’s Community Notes program, there are still many questions about how it will work.
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The new program, which does not yet appear to have an official name, will roll out to eligible contributors who will be invited via email or a notification in their Creator Studio portal. Only creators with an active channel in good standing will be invited, according to YouTube.
“Viewers in the US will begin to see notes on the videos in the coming weeks and months,” YouTube said in a blog post. “In this initial pilot, external evaluators will rate the usefulness of the notes, which will help train our systems. These third-party reviewers are the same people who provide feedback on YouTube search results and recommendations. As the pilot project progresses, we will look to have the taxpayers themselves rate the notes as well.”
YouTube emphasized that its efforts are simply experimental at this time and the company anticipates issues that will need to be resolved throughout the process.
“The pilot will be available on mobile devices in the US and in English to start,” YouTube said in a blog post. on Monday. “During this testing phase, we anticipate that there will be errors: notes that don’t match the video, or potentially incorrect information, and that is part of how we will learn from the experiment.”
YouTube will also allow users to rate whether a note is useful, which in theory will help improve the system:
From there, we will use a bridge-based algorithm to consider these ratings and determine which grades are published.
A bridge-based algorithm helps identify notes that are useful to a broad audience across perspectives. If many people who have rated notes differently in the past now rate the same note as helpful, then our system is more likely to display that note below a video. These systems will continually improve as more notes are written and graded on a wide range of topics.
The problem of how to address misinformation and misinformation has long been an issue on the Internet. But things have become much more important over the last decade, with the 2016 presidential election and the Covid-19 pandemic 2020 making it clear that bad information can have very real consequences for the world. When lies spread quickly online, you can end up with someone like Trump as president, as well as many people who are convinced that basic public health measures, like vaccines, will actually make them sick.
To further complicate matters, we have nation-state actors spreading their own disinformation, while countries like Russia, China, and the United States compete for dominance in the post-Cold War world order. As Reuters revealed last week, the US military managed hundreds of Twitter accounts In 2020 and 2021, propaganda was spread questioning the safety of China’s Covid-19 vaccine.
There are still many unanswered questions about how YouTube’s new fact-checking system will work, including how notes might appear when the claim is made in a very long video. Will there be timestamps to help identify where something in the video is wrong? How many notes will be allowed in a given video? YouTube did not respond to questions about those details on Monday. We will update this post if we receive a response.
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