An Update on Coronavirus Content on Medium

What we’re doing in editorial and beyond

This is a very challenging time for the world, and access to accurate, credible information is more important than ever. Medium is both an open platform, where anyone can write, and a publisher, with an in-house team of journalists who work on the nine publications within the Medium Editorial Group. Given the moment we find ourselves in, with a novel coronavirus spreading around the globe, we’ve created a new resource for credible information—the Medium Coronavirus Blog—and added more safeguards against the distribution of potentially harmful misinformation.

We recently added a team of health and science editors to work with our human curators on coronavirus-related stories with the goal of limiting the spread of bad or wrong information. The Medium Coronavirus Blog—which contains only credible, expert-backed stories published on Medium and from around the web—is run by our in-house health and science teams, who take very seriously the task of sharing reliable information every day, and especially now.

We also removed the paywall from coronavirus-related stories, and launched a Covid-19 newsletter from an in-house journalist with extensive experience covering infectious diseases. You can sign up for that here.

This week, we clarified our existing policy on how it relates to Covid-19 and coronavirus content. Our Trust and Safety team enforces our policies and guidelines, including the removal of stories that violate those rules. We also added a banner on coronavirus-related stories reminding readers that Medium is an open platform and not every story has been fact-checked.

Our team of curators monitor the platform for quality stories and work with the Trust and Safety team on ones that potentially misinform readers. (Our curation operation affects what we actively distribute on Medium, but it does not control what might go viral on social media, for instance.)

We don’t take for granted the role Medium plays in the sharing of information and ideas, and we are improving our systems all the time. Consider this a snapshot of our continuous commitment to that.