Houston Chronicle

Google chief pledges to scour more content as elections loom

- By Mark Bergen

The chief executive officers of Alphabet’s Google and YouTube pledged to scour videos and other content more closely for misleading news and inappropri­ate messages on their web services ahead of elections in the U.S later this year.

“We have more elections coming, so we’re all working harder,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said during an interview at an event in San Francisco on Friday hosted by MSNBC and Recode. “We feel a huge sense of responsibi­lity.”

Later this year, midterm elections will determine which party runs Congress, now controlled by Republican­s.

YouTube chief Susan Wojcicki said the online video service is trying to hire as many employees as possible to scrutinize videos in tandem with computers running artificial-intelligen­ce software to identify and quickly remove offensive and inaccurate material.

“It has to be humans and you need to have those machines,” she said.

Google’s search engine and its news-aggregatio­n service have been criticized for showing misleading answers and distributi­ng false stories online. Meanwhile, YouTube is facing one of the worst crises in its roughly 18-year existence after advertiser­s found their marketing messages running alongside extremist and offensive videos. YouTube has also been swept up in investigat­ions into whether Russia used social media to influence the 2016 presidenti­al election.

However, Pichai warned that it’s difficult for such a large company to decide what is true or false. “Drawing the line is becoming increasing­ly hard,” he said.

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