It used to be that in the past, we would see social media influencers on platforms like Instagram or YouTube advertise products in subtle ways. The idea is presumably to make it seem less like an advertorial and more “natural”, but in recent times we’ve started to see social media platforms make it clearer if a post has been sponsored.Now it looks like YouTube is doing the same as well, except that in this case it will now label news broadcast videos upload onto its platforms if it has government funding. According to YouTube, “In one small step towards that commitment, today we will start rolling out notices below videos uploaded by news broadcasters that receive some level of government or public funding. Our goal is to equip users with additional information to help them better understand the sources of news content that they choose to watch on YouTube.”
This is clearly done to provide transparency for YouTube’s users, who may or may not want to know if a particular news broadcast might have been funded by the government, which we guess you could argue might be biased to a certain extent. However YouTube does not expect this feature to be perfect, and are encouraging users and publishers to send them feedback to help them improve the feature over time.
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