Over 10,000 to help curb shady videos, YouTube says
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 her blog post this week doesn’t say how many the company already has. A spokeswoma said 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 it to help remove violent extremist videos.
Several advertisers have reportedly pulled ads from YouTube recently 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. YouTube said this week that it is also taking steps to try to reassure advertisers that their ads won’t run next to gross videos.
Facebook in May said it would hire 3,000 more people to review videos and posts and, later, another 1,000 to review ads after discovering Russian ads meant to influence the U.S. presidential election.