YouTube said Thursday it would begin removing videos that made false or unsafe claims about abortion in a bid to crack down on misinformation about the medical procedure.
The move comes as women in many areas of the United States seek reliable pregnancy-related information online as abortion rights are revoked.
“We believe it’s important to connect people to content from authoritative sources on health topics, and we continually review our policies and products as real-world events develop,” a YouTube spokesman said in response to an AFP Inquiry.
“Starting today and over the next few weeks, we will remove content that provides instructions for unsafe abortion methods or promotes false claims about abortion safety under our Medical Misinformation Policy.”
Some of the content that YouTube says it will remove from its platform worldwide includes instructions for unsafe at-home abortions and false claims such as: B. that there is a high risk that the procedure will cause cancer or infertility.
YouTube said it will also begin adding information from the National Library of Medicine to abortion-related videos or requests to provide reliable context.
The video-streaming site is powered by Google, owned by Alphabet, which announced earlier this month that it will delete users’ location history when they visit abortion clinics, domestic violence shelters and other privacy-seeking sites .
“If our systems determine that someone has visited one of these locations, we will delete those entries from location history shortly after the visit,” Jen Fitzpatrick, Google’s senior vice president, wrote in a blog post at the time.
The tech company’s changes follow the reversal of the US Supreme Court’s 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion, freeing a number of states to ban or severely restrict the procedure, and sparking mass protests across the country.
Activists and politicians have urged Google and other tech giants to limit the amount of information they collect to avoid using it for abortion investigations and law enforcement.
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