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YouTube will augment conspiracy theories with Wikipedia excerpts

Take a walk through the halls of YouTube and you’ll find all manner of conspiracy theories.

The Earth is flat, the moon landing was filmed in a basement and other wild theories are flung around YouTube like water in a pool.

It’s a problem for people that are looking for real information about something and YouTube will fight this according to its chief executive officer Susan Wojcicki.

Speaking at South by South West (SXSW) Wojcicki said that in the coming weeks videos about conspiracy theories would feature text boxes containing information about the subject from Wikipedia.

“When there are videos that are focused around something that’s a conspiracy — and we’re using a list of well-known internet conspiracies from Wikipedia — then we will show a companion unit of information from Wikipedia showing that here is information about the event,” Wojcicki said according to a report by The Verge.

While Wikipedia is not academically verified information (while the site is curated it is open to editing by the public) it is less biased than a video about how the moon landing was faked.

The CEO of the world’s largest collection of cat and Logan Paul videos went on to say that this feature could be used to show alternate sources underneath controversial videos in the future.

We do wonder how Alex Jones would feel about links to CNN and The New York Times being featured beneath his videos.

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