YouTube made news once again when it announced that it would hire 10,000 workers to moderate and clean up the site’s video content. Here is some insight into what these workers would be doing, and why YouTube is once again putting a priority on curtailing free speech that it deems to be offensive.
Google, like many large corporations in the country, has tried to automate a large number of jobs that used to be done by actual people. However, the company’s attempts to use AI to police YouTube hasn’t been entirely successful.
It has been estimated that the programs YouTube uses to locate and remove unwanted content are only successful about 75% of the time. That means that one out of four videos that don’t meet Google’s standards go unnoticed. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has noted that some of the 10,000 employees being hired in the near future will be tasked with teaching artificial intelligence how to locate videos that the company wants removed from the website. Additionally, Google is hiring even more employees for positions related to providing artificial intelligence training.
It should also be noted that a number of large companies have recently pulled all their video advertisements from YouTube after discovering their advertisements were shown next to video content from someone the news media has dubbed a “hate preacher”. The threat to the company’s revenue stream is surely one of the many reasons why YouTube is suddenly hiring people to police its content.
Naturally, companies want to be careful about who they are associated with; however, pulling or demonetizing content simply because advertisers don’t agree with it could set a dangerous precedent as large companies in the United States and abroad should really have no say in others’ freedom of expression.
Yet another reason why YouTube is becoming increasingly eager to censor its content is the fact that it is facing pressure from not just advertisers, but also governments, advocates, regulators and individuals who say that Google isn’t doing enough to get rid of radical, hate-filled content.
The company was recently forced to have another look at videos that were marked as appropriate for children in spite of the fact that they had creepy storylines, were filled with profanity and in some cases featured illegal behavior. British PM Theresa May recently called on YouTube and other social media channels to remove radical content. The fact that Facebook has hired 3,000 new employees to police content earlier this year may have been yet another factor putting pressure on Google to take similar measures.
Of course, there is plenty of content on social media that really should be removed. Videos advocating murder, torture, child abuse and other heinous crimes definitely fit this description. Content that is not in any way, shape or form appropriate for children should be flagged. However, the fact remains that YouTube does not have a good track record for differentiating between content that is extremist and content that it and its advertisers simply don’t like. This was made clear when the social networking site demonetized Ron Paul’s video channel after he criticized President Trump for increasing troop levels in Afghanistan. Google made an even more embarrassing gaffe a few months back when it shut down the websites of a non-political statistics professor who has no background in politics.
It is impossible to discern exactly what Google is thinking with its new plan to hire people to police YouTube. No one knows what instructions these people are being given, how much training they will have and what criteria they will judge video content by. It also remains to be seen what role AI will play in identifying and removing content, although it does seem that YouTube wants to delegate the job solely to AI in the future. However, what is fast becoming common knowledge is that social media networks are being put under pressure to censor freedom of speech.
The fact that only a few tech giants can control what billions of people all over the world can or cannot say online is disconcerting to say the least. It is even more alarming that these companies are all too eager to weed out content indiscriminately instead of finding effective ways to get rid of truly malicious content without infringing on freedom of speech.
~ Liberty Planet
