YouTube tells moderators to prioritize 'freedom of expression' over potential harm, including political, social and cultural issues
YouTube, which issues warnings and deletes videos that violate its terms of use, has been loosening its regulations since the end of 2024. If there is a possibility that 'freedom of expression' outweighs 'the risk of harm caused by the video,' the video may be left up instead of being deleted.
YouTube Loosens Video Content Moderation Rules - The New York Times
YouTube will “protect free expression” by pulling back on content moderation - Ars Technica
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/youtube-adopts-looser-moderation-policy-for-videos-about-elections-gender-and-more/
According to the New York Times, which investigated YouTube's internal documents in mid-December 2024, YouTube is instructing moderators to proactively leave up videos that are deemed to be of 'public interest.' For example, videos of city council meetings, election-related rallies, political conversations, etc. In addition, while the previous instruction was to 'remove videos if more than a quarter of the content violates the policy,' this standard has been relaxed to 'more than half.'
As a result of this deregulation, videos that were previously considered to be misinformation will remain and will not be deleted. For example, a video that includes the content that 'COVID-19 vaccines change people's genes' would have violated YouTube's policy as medical misinformation, but it was determined that it should not be deleted because 'social interest outweighs risk.' According to YouTube's training materials, the video was deemed to have news value because it included 'recent news related to vaccines' from Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and it was deemed to have low risk because it did not explicitly recommend anti-vaccination.
'We continually update our moderator guidance on trending topics, retiring policies when they no longer make sense and strengthening policies when we have a good reason to,' YouTube spokesperson Nicole Bell said in a statement.
YouTube has long taken steps to remove videos that contain nudity, graphic violence, and hate speech, but has broadened its interpretation of the rules to include not removing videos that have sufficient educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic merit. With this latest relaxation of restrictions, in addition to political content, topics such as ideology, activism, race, gender, sexuality, abortion, immigration, and censorship will also be deemed to be in the public interest.
In a specific example, a 43-minute video discussing a hearing on the Trump administration's cabinet appointments contained derogatory language against transgender people, but was deemed to be upheld because it contained only one instance of violation of the policy of 'prohibiting hate speech against identifiable individuals.' In addition, a video discussing the impeachment and arrest of former South Korean President Yoon Sung-ryul contained a problematic statement that 'I imagined Yoon being executed by guillotine,' but the risk of danger was deemed low because 'hoping for execution by guillotine is not realistic.'
Since these policies were put into place, YouTube has removed 192,586 videos for being 'hateful and abusive' in the first three months of 2025.
'We are mindful that the definition of 'public interest' is constantly evolving, and we've updated our policy exceptions to reflect new topics we see on our platform today. Our goal remains the same: to protect free expression on YouTube while mitigating serious harm,' Bell said.
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