YouTube expands team to tackle extremist content

Google-owned YouTube has announced to add more than 10,000 people to its content moderator team. The content moderators will be responsible to review and remove extremist content from the platform. The current team consists of around 8,000 members.

In a blog post, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said that the company is taking strict measures against inappropriate content. He said, "We will continue the significant growth of our teams into next year, 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. At the same time, we are expanding the network of academics, industry groups and subject matter experts who we can learn from and support to help us better understand emerging issues. We will use our cutting-edge machine learning more widely to allow us to quickly and efficiently remove content that violates our guidelines."

The blog post also says that YouTube is ramping up its team of ad reviewers to ensure advertising doesn't appear alongside or within the inappropriate content. "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," Wojcicki further added.

In addition to using human moderators, the company is also developing machine learning technology to automatically flag up inappropriate content.

Lately, YouTube has been facing a lot of flak for promoting extremist and terrorist propaganda. The company has also been failing to prevent predatory comments and accounts targeting children. So, expanding its team of content moderators seems like the right thing to do.