Embedding, not rehosting: how the player works

What loads when the page loads

Nothing from YouTube except one image. Each video page renders a thumbnail served from YouTube's image host and a play button. No YouTube script runs and no YouTube player is created until you click. The page's own code and text come from this site.

What happens when you press play

The play button is replaced by YouTube's standard embedded player, loaded from youtube-nocookie.com, which is YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed domain. From that moment the video streams from YouTube to your browser under YouTube's terms and Google's privacy policy. In privacy-enhanced mode YouTube states that it does not use the embed to personalise your browsing experience outside its own site; it still receives the request for the video. We do not see what you watch.

What we never do

We never download a video, store a copy, re-encode it, serve it from our own host or a content delivery network, or make our own thumbnail from it. We never transcribe a video at length or publish its script; the fact-checks summarise and quote sparingly. If a channel removes a video, our embed stops working and the page is retired. If a channel asks us to remove an embed, we do, and the page is retired the same way.

Why the thumbnail-first design

Two reasons. Pages load faster and lighter, which matters on phones. And nothing is sent to YouTube on your behalf until you decide to watch, which is the right default for a health topic.

The verification record

Each video's page shows the date its id was confirmed against YouTube's public oEmbed endpoint and the title and channel name that endpoint returned. Those values are stored in the site's data file and checked by an automated test before every deployment. See how we choose videos for the editorial side.