US Election 2020: YouTube channels make money from ads promoting Trump voting fraud claims

While the key states are still tallying ballots, several YouTube channels were promoting debunked accusation about voting fraud in the US presidential race. While the Associated Press and other organisations deemed the video content false or inaccurate, YouTubers were seen promoting conspiratorial content that could jeopardise advertising and memberships revenue they got from the video service platform. 

Social media websites, including Google, Facebook and Twitter, have struggled to guard against the misinformation as millions of posts arrive each day. YouTube, which is owned by Alphabet Inc’s Google, also has rules that forbid channels using its revenue-generation tools from making “claims that are demonstrably false and could significantly undermine participation or trust in an electoral or democratic process”.  As no action was taken against such ads and membership sales on the channels, researchers who track misinformation said that it is fuelled by content creators who see and an opportunity to profit from it. 

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YouTube’s policy on “demonstrably false” election information drew attention when CNBC reported that One American News Network was generating ad revenue from its YouTube video prematurely declaring President Donald Trump the winner. The video service platform said that it would not remove the clip, but stopped running ads on it. 

As false and unfounded claims have evolved over the course of Election Day, critics believe that in environment explicitly built to promote instant sharing and viral posts, disclaimers do not cut it. It was noted that initially, Trump had said that he had “won” even though vote counting is still ongoing. Then the US President even said that unanticipated mail-in votes were appearing out of nowhere, but in fact, they were long expected. 

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MAGA-supporters share unfounded allegations of fraud 

Trump has made unsubstantiated accusations about the Democratic Party’s stealing the election. MAGA-supporters have also rallied behind the misinformation on social media and in protests outside vote-counting sites. Throughout the course of the day, Trump and his supporters have repeatedly tried to flood the internet with unfounded allegations of fraud. Twitter even marked three of Trump’s latest tweets, including the one making a false claim about “surprise ballot dumps,” as potentially “misleading about an election or other civic process”.

The attempts at policing those declarations began early on Wednesday when Twitter hid a Trump tweet that claimed: “we are BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election”. Twitter restricted the post and instead displayed the message "Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process”. The micro-blogging website had said that it had suspended the accounts for violating its policy against the “coordination” by posting content while engaging in some automated behaviour.

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