Google is beefing up its efforts to tackle violent extremism on YouTube.
Iin a Sunday blog post and op-ed in the Financial Times Google said it plans to increase its use of technology to help identify extremist and terrorism-related videos and "greatly increase" the number of independent experts in YouTube's Trusted Flagger program, which offers tools for people and organizations who are particularly interested in and effective at reporting content that violates the platform's Community Guidelines.
The company is also planning to take a tougher stance on questionable videos that don't clearly violate its policies and increase its efforts to redirect potential Isis recruits to anti-terrorist content. The changes come after the British government and several other big advertisters recently pulled their ads from YouTube because they appeared with videos containing extremist, homophobic, or racist content.
"There should be no place for terrorist content on our services," Google's General Counsel Kent Walker wrote. "While we and others have worked for years to identify and remove content that violates our policies, the uncomfortable truth is that we, as an industry, must acknowledge that more needs to be done. Now."
Google already uses "content-based signals" to help identify terrorist videos for removal, and image-matching technology to prevent known terrorist content from being re-uploaded after it's removed. Now it's going a step further.
"We will now devote more engineering resources to apply our most advanced machine learning research to train new 'content classifiers' to help us more quickly identify and remove extremist and terrorism-related content," Walker wrote.
He added that human experts still play an important role in combating this challenge since its technology can't always differentiate between violent propaganda and religious or newsworthy content. The new Trusted Flaggers will add to the thousands of people Google already has to review and counter abuse on its platforms.
Google is also cracking down on videos containing "inflammatory religious or supremacist content."
In the future, these videos "will appear behind an interstitial warning and they will not be monetized, recommended, or eligible for comments or user endorsements," Walker wrote. "That means these videos will have less engagement and be harder to find."
Finally, Walker said YouTube is planning to implement what's known as the "redirect method" more broadly across Europe. This approach "harnesses the power of targeted online advertising to reach potential Isis recruits, and redirects them towards anti-terrorist videos that can change their minds about joining."
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Google has also previously committed to working with other tech giants such as Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter to establish and international forum to tackle terrorism online.
"Collectively, these changes will make a difference," Walker wrote. "Together, we can build lasting solutions that address the threats to our security and our freedoms. It is a sweeping and complex challenge. We are committed to playing our part."
Meanwhile, Facebook also recently said it's using artificial intelligence, in partnership with human expertise, to keep terrorist content from groups such as ISIS and Al Qaeda off the platform. However, word on Friday spread that Facebook inadvertently exposed the identities of content moderators tasked with banning those terrorist groups. The "security lapse," as Facebook described it, affected more than 1,000 workers who use Facebook's content moderation software to remove terrorist propaganda and other content that's not allowed.
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