YouTubers like asapSCIENCE, Smarter Every Day may help teach kids about fake news

Google wants to invest $10 million over the next two years in supporting literacy efforts, including media literacy, and is partnering with YouTubers to help teach kids how to spot fake news.

YouTubers like asapSCIENCE, an award-winning science channel with more than 7 million subscribers, and Smarter Every Day, another science channel with more than 5.5 million subscribers, are a couple of creators whom YouTube is planning to work with, according to a company representative. Both asapSCIENCE and Smarter Every Day have expressed interest helping with the initiative, according to a rep, and more information is expected to be released in the coming months prior to the program’s launch.

Creators who focus on other educational or news-focused areas may also work with YouTube as part of the initiative. The goal is to help teach kids how to discern what is fact and what is fiction when they’re reading news articles or watching YouTube videos. Google’s decision to invest in a media literacy project comes at an especially interesting and troubling time for YouTube. YouTube’s growing conspiracy theory problem, an issue that has been written about at length and studied by academics, is one the company is now trying to address.

Following last month’s school shooting in Parkland, Florida, videos describing survivors of the attack as “crisis actors” found their way to the top of YouTube’s trending list — meaning that the platform’s algorithm recommended them. YouTube’s CEO, Susan Wojcicki, responded last week by announcing that the company would begin supplementing such videos with annotations from Wikipedia about the topics in question. The decision was met with scorn from reporters, critics and even Wikipedia itself, whose executives penned a letter calling Wojcicki and her team out for not reaching out to the Wikimedia Foundation.

YouTube is caught in a singular predicament: People turn to the platform for news, including watching official news clips from reputable organizations like CNN, but YouTube doesn’t believe it is a news organization.

“If there is an important news event, we want to be delivering the right information,” Wojcicki said, as reported by BuzzFeed, before reiterating that “we are not a news organization.”

That means that YouTube’s moderation and engineering teams have been trying to come up with ways to help discern fact from conspiracy theories. Changing the recommendation algorithm and bringing in Wikipedia annotations are intended to help. Part of the issue, however, is that YouTube won’t take a stance against some of the most notorious conspiracy theories peddled on its platform, even though the company admits they’re a problem for YouTube’s viewers. InfoWars host Alex Jones, for example, who is perhaps best known for claiming that the Sandy Hook school shooting didn’t happen, is one of the biggest contributors to YouTube’s ongoing conspiracy theory problem. As we said in a previous piece:

Jones, like many other conspiracy theorists and propagandists on YouTube, learned how to take advantage of Google’s algorithm to ensure that their content is seen and shared. The trick is simple: Take a popular news topic — a school shooting, for example — then add a term like “crisis actor” to it, and publish content about it. Jonathan Albright, research director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia Journalism School, wrote about this growing trend in late February, just after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

“Mass shooting, false flag, and crisis actor conspiracy videos on YouTube are a well-established, if not flourishing genre,” said Albright.

Investing in global literacy and media literacy over the next couple of years, and getting YouTubers involved, may be Google’s next step in combating fake news. It’s still uncertain whether YouTube will ever take further action and ban conspiracy theorists once and for all.