YouTube hiring 10000 staff to weed out extremist content

Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube confirmed this news through a blog post.

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Google's YouTube will soon hire more than 10,000 staff in an attempt to weed out extremist content.

The human reviewers will be responsible for removing videos which violate the terms and conditions of the site, and the team will also work together to teach computers in picking troublesome videos, confirmed Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube in a blog post.

"Human reviewers remain essential to both removing content and training machine learning systems because human judgment is critical to making contextualized decisions on content. Since June, our trust and safety teams have manually reviewed nearly 2 million videos for violent extremist content, helping train our machine-learning technology to identify similar videos in the future," wrote Susan Wojcicki.

Susan also added that the website will also take aggressive actions on comments posted under videos. The YouTube CEO also revealed plans for launching a new comment moderation tool, and in some cases, shutting down the comments altogether.

Susan added that the company is working together with NCMEC, the IWF, and other child safety organizations around the world to report predatory behavior and accounts to correct law enforcement agencies.

In the blog post, Susan revealed that YouTube's cutting-edge machine learning technology has removed over 150,000 videos for violent extremism. The website also shut down the comment sections of more than 625,000 videos.

"Our advances in machine learning let us now take down nearly 70 percent of violent extremist content within eight hours of upload and nearly half of it in two hours and we continue to accelerate that speed.," said Susan.

The blog post also talked about the strict approach the company is going to embrace on the advertising terms.

"We believe this requires a new approach to advertising on YouTube, carefully considering which channels and videos are eligible for advertising. We are planning to apply stricter criteria, conduct more manual curation, while also significantly ramping up our team of ad reviewers to ensure ads are only running where they should," concluded Susan.

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