YouTube bolsters team fighting video violations
NEW YORK — YouTube is hiring more people to help curb videos that violate its policies.
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said “some bad actors are exploiting” the Google-owned service to “mislead, manipulate, harass or even harm.”
Google will have more than 10,000 workers address the problem by next year, though Wojcicki’s blog post Monday doesn’t say how many the company already has. Spokeswoman Michelle Slavich said yesterday that some have already been hired, and the team will be a combination of employees and contractors.
Wojcicki said the company will apply lessons learned from combating violent and extremist videos to other “problematic” videos. YouTube will expand the use of “machinelearning” technology, a new form of artificial intelligence, to flag videos or comments that show hate speech or harm to children. It’s already been using the technology to help remove violent extremist videos.
Several advertisers have reportedly pulled ads from YouTube in the past few weeks as a result of stories about videos showing harm to children, hate speech and other topics they don’t want their ads next to. Some 250 advertisers earlier this year also said they would boycott YouTube because of extremist videos that promoted hate and violence.
There have been reports of creepy videos aimed at children and pedophiles posting comments on children’s videos in recent weeks. There was also a conspiracy theory video that came up in a YouTube search a day after the Las Vegas shooting in October that killed dozens.