YouTube CEO announces more human moderators to end violent kid videos
More people will be reviewing content across Google platforms, especially at YouTube which has had a problem of violent, disturbing videos targeted to kids making it onto the video site.
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced in a rare blog post that by next year, 10,000 human moderators would be reviewing content that violates policy.
"Human reviewers remain essential to both removing content and training machine learning systems because human judgment is critical to making contextualized decisions on content," Wojcicki wrote.
YouTube had previously promised more human oversight and more machine learning to flag the content, but Monday's announcement is the first from the CEO and with strategy details.
She said the human moderation teams work with child safety organizations to report inappropriate behavior.
She also wrote a post directed at video "creators." In that statement, she explained that there's been an increase in "bad actors seeking to exploit our platform," and specifically called out "videos that masquerade as family-friendly content, but are not."
She assured the creator community that the new plans to fight abuse would help them. "These actions harm our community by undermining trust in our platform and hurting the revenue that helps creators like you thrive," she wrote.
In a personal moment, Wojcicki wrote how YouTube is a valuable tool for her children, but she's seen how the platform gets exploited.
"But I’ve also seen up-close that there can be another, more troubling, side of YouTube’s openness. I’ve seen how some bad actors are exploiting our openness to mislead, manipulate, harass or even harm," she said.
The post laid out details about advertising, more reports about flagged videos to promote transparency, and machine learning.
With strong numbers from machine learning to flag extremist content since the middle of the year, Wojcicki announced that the same technology has started training to find content that's unsafe for children and that contains hate speech.
Topics YouTube
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
