What To Do About Misinformation on YouTube?

 Dear patrons,

As you likely know, we recently published a video about the problem with misinformation - and what MinuteEarth is doing to combat it. As a result, many of you became patrons for the first time or increased your pledges. Thank you! It really warms our hearts to have so many of you directly supporting our work. 

That video only scraped the surface of the topic of misinformation, though. And we’d love to continue the conversation with more videos on the topic. One recent conversation we had, and saw many of you having in the comments of the video, was about the role that platforms like YouTube should be playing. Should they be doing more to disincentivize channels from consistently posting misinformative videos? Should these platforms be deciding what counts as “misinformation”? Are there other more effective ways to fight misinformation? Is the spread of misinformation a major issue for humanity? 

These are difficult questions and the conversations they inspire are very interesting. I’m particularly fascinated by this topic and have lots of thoughts I’d like to share and discuss. But before making more videos about it, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter. Do you have any recommendations on books/essays/papers that talk about this topic?

Again, thanks for your support <3

- Ever

P.S. We’re going to be making posts a little more often on here with images from our videos (including deleted scenes), polls getting your help on projects we’re working on, and other fun stuff. Patreon sends you an email any time we make a post by default, but if you only want to receive emails when we post a video and don’t care about all the other stuff, you can uncheck “When MinuteEarth posts any other content” in your email notification settings.