10,000-strong Google army to tackle extremists
‘We will continue the significant growth of our teams ... to over 10,000 in 2018’
GOOGLE has pledged to deploy an army of 10,000 staff to root out violent extremism and content that endangers children on Youtube.
Writing in The Daily Telegraph today, Susan Wojcicki, the chief executive of Youtube, which is owned by Google, admits that “bad actors are exploiting” the internet site to “mislead, manipulate, harass or even harm”. Ms Wojcicki discloses for the first time the scale of the operation to police Youtube, the world’s second most popular website.
The video-sharing website and other internet giants including Facebook have come under pressure over the availability of extremist material and propaganda in the wake of five terrorist attacks in the UK this year. An official report published today by David Anderson QC, the former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, is expected to highlight the huge problems faced by MI5 in its attempts to monitor thousands of potential jihadists, many radicalised by hate preachers posting online.
Ms Wojcicki says today that Youtube has already developed “computer-learning” technology that can identify videos containing extremist content.
She says it will now deploy the same technology to track videos that risk children’s safety and promulgate hate speech. Ms Wojcicki adds: “We will continue the significant growth of our teams, with the goal of bringing the total number of people across Google working to address content that might violate our policies to over 10,000 in 2018.”
The task for Youtube is huge. It is estimated that about half a million hours of content are posted on the video-sharing site every day. Ms Wojcicki writes that since June, Youtube’s enforcement teams have reviewed two million videos for extremist content and that 150,000 have been taken down. Some 98 per cent of videos that were removed were initially flagged by the “machine-learning
algorithms”, she said. Almost half are removed within two hours of upload and 70 per cent within eight hours.
Those videos included posts by jihadists sympathetic to Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) and other Islamist terror groups as well as by far-right extremists.
Bomb-making instructions for a device similar to the one used by Salman Abedi, the Manchester Arena bomber, were removed from Youtube in the wake of atrocity. Reports claimed the video had been shared thousands of times in recent weeks on platforms such as Google Drive and Google Photos after resurfacing a fortnight ago.
Mr Anderson’s report is expected to question MI5’S failure to act on warnings on Abedi and at least one of the London Bridge attackers. It is also expected to suggest the security services step up their use of “data-mining” to monitor the online lives of terror suspects to prevent future attacks.