YouTube wants to combat disinformation and hatred, hiring thousands to remove harmful content

The Alphabet company, which owns the Google search engine and through it the YouTube internet portal for sharing videos, is hiring more staffers. They will be tasked with inspecting and removing videos with extremist, violent content.

Susan Wojcicki, the head of YouTube, blogged on 5 December that there are meant to be as many as 10 000 new hires within Google for this purpose next year. Critics have blamed her firm for disseminating disinformation, hateful commentaries, and videos with content that is harmful to children.

The YouTube head posted that in addition to increasing the number of “overseers”, YouTube is also working on machine technology that will automatically label content as harmful. Thanks to the development of such technology, controllers are already able to delete almost five times more videos than before.

As many as 98 % of the videos of violent content deleted currently are labeled harmful by an algorithm, British daily The Guardian quotes Wojcicki as saying. The firm is also beginning to apply stricter criteria and to broaden their team of reviewers for advertising content.

Last month numerous renowned firms removed their advertisements from both Google and YouTube. The companies did not like their ads appearing next to videos with sexual commentaries about children.