YouTube on Wednesday said it mistakenly promoted on its site a conspiratorial video accusing a teenage witness of last week’s Florida school shooting of being an actor, the latest sign that social media sites are struggling to suppress misleading and false content on their platforms.
The world’s largest video site said it removed the video clip labeling Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student David Hogg an actor after it was viewed more than 200,000 times and appeared as the No. 1 trending video on the site earlier in the day.
The video showed a local TV news clip of Mr. Hogg, who has spoken out about the need for gun control laws in the wake of the shooting, being interviewed on a beach in Los Angeles several months ago about an unrelated incident. It was meant to cast doubt on the student’s story of witnessing the Parkland school shooting.
In an interview on CNN, Mr. Hogg said he isn’t an actor and confirmed he attends Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Mr. Hogg said he was visiting friends in Los Angeles a few months ago when he was interviewed by a local TV reporter about an incident where his friend was confronted by a lifeguard on Redondo Beach.
James Gard, a teacher at Stoneham Douglas, confirmed Mr. Hogg is a current student in one of his classes at the school. Mr. Hogg couldn’t be reached for comment.
“Because the video contained footage from an authoritative news source, our system misclassified it,” a spokeswoman for YouTube, a unit of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, said in an email. “As soon as we became aware of the video, we removed it from ‘trending’ and from YouTube for violating our policies. We are working to improve our systems moving forward.”
YouTube, with more than 1.5 billion users, has faced criticism for its algorithms that have recommended channels featuring conspiracy theories, extreme partisan viewpoints and misleading videos, even when those users haven’t shown interest in such content. When users show a political bias in what they choose to view, YouTube typically recommends videos that echo those biases, often with more extreme viewpoints, a Wall Street Journal investigation found earlier this month.YouTube said last December it would hire 10,000 moderators to help clean up content on the site after changing its algorithm to surface “more authoritative” news sources to people searching about breaking-news events. It also said earlier this month it was planning to give users more context for videos promoting conspiracy theories or state-sponsored content. hMr. Hogg’s background also became a divisive topic elsewhere on social media this week. His name was a trending topic on Facebook, where more than 160,000 users have published posts with the phrase “crisis actor” in them. A search for his name on Twitter surfaced photos and video clips suggesting he is an actor.
Twitter in a statement said it is working to address reports of targeted abuse and harassment of survivors of the mass shooting. In particular, Twitter said it is using anti-spam and anti-abuse tools to delete “malicious automation” on this topic. “Such behavior goes against everything we stand for at Twitter, and we are taking action on any content that violates our terms of service,” a spokeswoman said.
Mary deBree, Facebook’s head of content policy, said the social network is removing the content about Florida students. “Images that attack the victims of last week’s tragedy in Florida are abhorrent,” Ms. deBree said in an emailed statement.
The tendency for social-media algorithms to promote controversial content was exploited by a Russian group who created politically charged posts on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to sow discord in the run-up to the U.S. presidential elections, according to indictments secured by U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller last week.That problem continues, according to the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan group that tracks Russian online disinformation campaigns. The group said it saw an increase in shooting-related hashtags on Twitter from Russian bots in the wake of the Florida school shooting on Feb. 14 that killed 17 people.
—Georgia Wells and Deepa Seetharaman contributed to this article.