So recently I have noticed on Youtube that under certain news organization videos they have added a little disclaimer on the bottom of every one of their videos describing how they are publicly funded or funded by the government. Each one of these disclaimers contains a link to a wikipedia article on the respective news organizations. According to Youtube, these disclaimers are only seen by U.S. residents and are to help against the problem of fake news and propaganda in the media and also to give viewers additional information so they know more about their news sources. Personally, I think this is one of the most absurd ideas ever. If they wanted to specifically target fake news, they would include a report button on videos for that, and once there are a significant amount of fake news reports add a tag on the video stating it may be fake news. Currently this disclaimer is attached to every video say the BBC or PBS uploads, regardless of whether the information they post is legitimate or not. Also, in regards to these disclaimers all they provide is one wikipedia article on the news page, some of which provide more positive information on the organizations than negative. Lastly, these disclaimers are only being attached to news organizations that are publicly funded or funded by the government. However, many organizations that have been known to report misinformation in the past have absolutely no disclaimers at all such as Fox News or InfoWars. These disclaimers just seem very bizarre to me and feel like Youtube is trying to influence their users to watch certain videos over other ones.
