According to a Friday statement from the social media site, YouTube will no longer remove videos that make false claims of election fraud in 2020.
The decision, made in advance of the 2024 elections, is a change from the strategy it adopted after the 2020 election.
The company claimed to have removed tens of thousands of videos contesting the validity of previous elections, but that "it was time to re-evaluate" at this point.
On June 2, the policy becomes operative.
Since the 2016 elections, there has been a lot of pressure on YouTube and other social media platforms to protect users from political misinformation.
According to the Google-owned platform, the new rule is being implemented because of the current environment's altered environment.
The company stated in a statement, "In the current environment, we find that while removing this content does curb some misinformation, it also could have the unintended effect of curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm.".
In the run-up to the 2024 election, YouTube promised to make changes to its policies, but it did not go into detail about what motivated the change. For a response, the BBC has contacted the business.
The business went on to say that it would keep enforcing other election-related misinformation policies, such as those that prohibit misleading information about where or how to vote from appearing in videos.
A video that Donald Trump posted on January 6, 2021 ordering protesters out of the US Capitol was removed as a result of the election fraud policy, which was implemented in December 2020. Trump repeated his false allegations of widespread fraud, which is why that video was attacked.
Trump said in the video, "This was a fraudulent election, but we can't play into the hands of these people. "Peace is necessary. You're very special, so please go home. We love you. ".
Because it also featured a clip of Mr. Trump repeating election lies, a video posted by a US congressional committee looking into the Capitol riot was taken down in 2022.
With more than 2.7 million subscribers, the company removed the restrictions on Mr. Trump's YouTube channel in March of this year.
The former president has shared roughly 20 brief videos in support of his campaign since then.
