Following a year in which YouTube has repeatedly promoted conspiracy-theory videos during breaking news events like the shootings in Parkland, Florida, and Las Vegas, the company announced on Monday a slew of new features it hopes will make news on the platform more reliable and less susceptible to manipulation. The company is also investing $25 million in grants to news organizations looking to expand their video operations, as part of a larger, $300 million program sponsored by YouTube's sister company, Google.

According to YouTube executives, the goal is to identify authoritative news sources, bring those videos to the top of users' feeds, and support quality journalism with tools and funding that will help news organizations more effectively reach their audiences. The challenge is deciding what constitutes authority when the public seems more divided than ever on which news sources to trust---or whether to trust the traditional news industry at all.

YouTube

Among the many changes YouTube announced Monday are substantive tweaks to the tools it uses to recommend news-related videos. In the coming weeks, YouTube will start to display an information panel above videos about developing stories, which will include a link to an article that Google News deems to be most relevant and authoritative on the subject. The move is meant to help prevent hastily recorded hoax videos from rising to the top of YouTube’s recommendations. And yet, Google News hardly has a spotless record when it comes to promoting authoritative content. Following the 2016 election, the tool surfaced a Wordpress blog falsely claiming Donald Trump won the popular vote as one of the top results for the term “final election results.”

YouTube is also expanding a feature, currently available in 17 countries, that shows up on the homepage during breaking news events. This section of the homepage will only surface videos from sources YouTube considers authoritative. The same goes for the videos that YouTube recommends viewers watch next.

These changes attempt to address the problem of misinformation online without adding more human moderators. With some 450 hours of video going up on YouTube every minute, “human curation isn’t really a viable solution,” Neal Mohan, YouTube's chief product officer, told reporters Monday.

Traditionally, YouTube's algorithm has prioritized a user's personal viewing history, as well as the context of the video that user is currently watching, when deciding what videos to surface next. That can be problematic because, as researchers have found, once you watch one conspiracy-theory video claiming that the student survivors of the Parkland shooting are crisis actors, YouTube may recommend you watch even more. With this change, the company is trying to interrupt that downward spiral. It's important to note, though, that YouTube is applying that standard only to breaking news and developing stories. For all other videos that users find on YouTube, the recommendation engine will work the old-fashioned way, which, YouTube executives acknowledge, may well turn up content that people find objectionable.