YouTube Hires Moderators To Eliminate Abusive Content

YouTube, an American video-sharing website headquartered in San Bruno, California, USA that allows users to upload, view, rate, share, add to favourites, report, comment on videos, and subscribe to other users faces high criticism from the general public for content abuse.

Recently, Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube spoke to the Daily Telegraph in an interview saying that the platform aims to boost their moderation workers to more than 10,000 employees by 2018 because of the increasing number of offensive and disturbing content being uploaded on the platform.

In the past months, YouTube was criticised for allowing users to post adult contents that were not suitable for children. For this reason, YouTube management has announced its new measures to remove adverts from videos depicting family entertainment character engaged in violent behaviours and also to block all comments on videos targeted at minor if inappropriate user comments are uploaded.

Wojcicki claims that the YouTube management has already started taking the initiative to rectify this issue.

She stated that since June of this year, 150,000 videos have been removed for violent extremism and some of the videos removed were spotted by the company’s machine-learning algorithms.

Wojcicki claims that since the commencement of the use of this machine learning technology to flag videos of this nature, the company has reviewed content that would have taken 180,000 persons working 40 hours a week in the same timeframe to access.

He further explained that although the machine learning could flag videos, it cannot be guaranteed that the machine learning flags disturbing content aimed at children. So, therefore it important to have human reviewers.

“Human reviewers remain essential to both removing content and training machine learning systems because human judgment is critical to making contextualized decisions on content,” say Wojcicki

YouTube believes that with the increased numbers of human moderators and machine learning technology that the issues the sites is having would be fixed in no time.