YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced Wednesday that content created by political figures and leaders will be allowed to remain on the site even if it violates the company’s “community guidelines.”
“When you have a political officer that is making information this is really important for their constituents to see, or for other global leaders to see, that is content that we would leave up because we think it’s important for other people to see,” the video-sharing platform’s chief executive said during remarks at the Atlantic Festival in Washington, D.C.
Documentaries and other educational, scientific, and artistic content, will also be exempt from YouTube’s guidelines, Wojcicki said.
The move by YouTube, which is a Google subsidiary, comes after Facebook announced a similar policy this week.
Facebook does not fact-check posts by politicians and allows such content to remain on the platform even if it breaks the company’s content rules, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs and communications, Nick Clegg, told the Atlantic Festival on Tuesday.
Twitter announced in June that it will place content from political figures that violates the company’s policies behind a “screen you have to click or tap through before you see the Tweet” in order to warn users about the violation before they view the content. The reach of such content will also be limited.
All of the major social media platforms have come under fire in recent years for purported anti-hate speech censorship that critics, particularly conservatives, have cast as politically biased. One of the nation’s leading pro-life organizations, Live Action, is fighting YouTube over alleged discrimination against the group’s anti-abortion posts.