(ANTIMEDIA) — Following the Las Vegas shooting, in which 59 people lost their lives and hundreds more were injured, YouTube is altering its search algorithms in order to suppress conspiracy theories about the event. From the Wall Street Journal:

“YouTube this week surfaced videos peddling misinformation, hateful messages and conspiracy theories to users tracking major news events — prompting the site to change its search results to promote more authoritative sources.

“For example, the fifth result when searching ‘Las Vegas shooting’ on YouTube late Tuesday yielded a video titled ‘Proof Las Vegas Shooting Was a FALSE FLAG attack—Shooter on 4th Floor.’ The video said there were multiple shooters in Sunday’s mass shooting, a claim dismissed by law enforcement. Posted by a channel called the End Times News Report, it amassed more than 1.1 million views in about 27 hours.”

According to The Independent, which reportedly spoke to an unnamed source close to YouTube, the company is aiming to “promote more reputable news,” and the effort is already underway.

“By Friday, the top ten results for ‘Las Vegas shooting’ all came from news outlets, or contained direct uploads of footage from the event,” the Independent wrote.

Facebook and YouTube’s parent company, Google, have also been under fire for allowing “conspiratorial” content to be published on their platforms, as NPR highlighted on October 3:

“In the hours just after the massacre in Las Vegas, some fake news started showing up on Google and Facebook. A man was falsely accused of being the shooter. His name bubbled up on Facebook emergency sites and when you searched his name on Google, links of sites connecting him with the shooting topped the first page.

“It appears to be another case of automation working so fast that humans can’t keep pace. Unfortunately, these powerful tech companies continue to be a main destination for news and it’s not clear how they can solve the problem.”

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