Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
In a new attempt to stem the flow of anti-vaccine misinformation, YouTube said Wednesday that it won’t allow videos that claim vaccines approved by health authorities are dangerous or don’t work. The platform is also banning prominent anti-vaccine accounts, including Joseph Mercola’s channel and the Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-linked Children’s Defense Fund.
YouTube pulled ads from anti-vaccination content in 2019, and said in October 2020 that it would remove videos that pushed misinformation around COVID-19 vaccines. The new policy expands to block misinformation around other vaccines, including the flu shot, the HPV vaccine, and the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Videos that inaccurately claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism…
