Youtube dedicates $25m to fighting fake news

Youtube has announced it will be investing $25m (£18.8m) into making changes on its site that can better support trusted news providers to produce online content.

The site will now start to prioritise videos from verified news sources on its Breaking News and Top News tabs so that it's "easier to find quality news". In the US, this will mean new features to help push out local news from the right places, avoiding any channels that might be spreading unreliable content.

Working with its parent company Google through the Google News Initiative, Youtube will also be boosting improvement to its Player for Publishers solution, which provides news organisations with reduced costs and improved monetisation, in an effort to encourage more sites to create their own video content.

Youtube's chief product officer Neal Mohan and chief business officer Robert Kyncl said in a joint statement: "We believe quality journalism requires sustainable revenue streams and that we have a responsibility to support innovation in products and funding for news."

In the coming weeks, Youtube will also start to provide a short preview of news articles in search results on Youtube that will link back to full articles in the first few hours of a major news event.

Alongside a reminder that breaking and developing news can rapidly change, it's hoped that linking to real articles which get updated as new information comes to light will counteract the static nature of breaking news videos that can often be misleading.

"The work of trusted journalistic organisations is as critical as ever, especially when it comes to seeking information about current events online," the two continued, acknowledging the issues the site has faced.

"We know there is a lot of work to do, but were eager to provide a better experience to users who come to YouTube every day to learn more about what is happening in the world from a diversity of sources."

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