Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Thursday, September 30th. I'm Nyla Boudou.

Here's how we're making you smarter today. Congressional reconciliation explained,

plus why President Biden rejected a meeting with the Palestinian President. But first,

cracking down on anti-vaxx influencers. He's today's one big thing.

YouTube announced yesterday that it's cracking down on anti-vaccination

information on its site. Beyond content just related to the COVID vaccine.

The platform has been a major source of misinformation about vaccines since well before the pandemic.

Margaret Harding McGill is a technology reporter for Axios and has been reporting the

story. Hi, Margaret. Hey, thank you for having me. Margaret, thanks for being here. What kind of

content is YouTube targeting with this? So YouTube had a policy that was focused on misinformation

specifically related to the COVID-19 vaccines. With that policy in place, they'd taken 130,000

videos down since October. And now they've decided they want to expand that policy to focus on

anti-vaccine misinformation beyond COVID-19. So this is vaccines like measles and mumps.

Vaccines that have been approved and confirmed to be safe and effective by local health authorities

and the World Health Organization. And so the types of videos that they're going to take down

are ones that claim that vaccines are dangerous. And some of the more common claims that they run

into the misinformation claims have been that these vaccines cause cancer or infertility or autism

or even that they contain microchips. And YouTube said they expect to take down quite a few.

How big of a platform has YouTube been for anti-vaccine information?

I think social media has obviously been a huge problem for spreading misinformation,

particularly related to the pandemic. And so for YouTube itself, they have said that they've

taken down more than a million videos for violating their overall COVID-19 medical misinformation policy.

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