Last night, the world looked on in shock as Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral was engulfed in flames.
Several videos of the incident have been uploaded to YouTube , and worrying, many appear to have been mislabeled by the platform’s fact-checking tool.
A new report by Buzzfeed has revealed that at least three of these videos were mislabeled as footage of the 9/11 terror attacks.
The issue appears to lie in the ‘information panels’ below the videos, which incorrectly provided details on the attack of New York’s World Trade Centre, rather than the fire at Notre Dame.
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These information panels are posted automatically by YouTube’s algorithms.
Worryingly, these false information panels led to widespread speculation that the Notre Dame fire was a terrorist attack, despite the fact that authorities found no evidence of this.
Following Buzzfeed's report, YouTube has now disabled these information panels.
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A spokesperson for YouTube said: “We are deeply saddened by the ongoing fire at the Notre Dame cathedral.
“Last year, we launched information panels with links to third-party sources like Encyclopaedia Britannica and Wikipedia for subjects subject to misinformation.
“These panels are triggered algorithmically and our systems sometimes make the wrong call. We are disabling these panels for live streams related to the fire."
