YouTube says it spots most terrorist videos before they're flagged
It promises to continue working on its anti-terrorist measures.
Last year, tech giants started working together to combat the spread of terrorist content online. One of them is Google-owned YouTube, which began implementing stricter measures in June in an effort to get rid of extremist videos that tend to pop up on the platform. According to the video streaming website, its flagging technology is now good enough that over 83 percent of the terrorist-related videos it removed over the past month didn't stay online long enough to get a single flag from a human user. That's apparently up eight percent from August.
YouTube upgraded the technology by feeding it a huge volume of new training examples. The company tasked the people working on the feature to review over a million videos and find the right ones. To ensure that the team is updated on issues regarding hate speech, radicalization and terrorism, YouTube has also teamed up with 35 more non-government organizations, including the International Center for the Study of Radicalization from King's College London and The Wahid Institute in Indonesia. Both of those groups focus on counterterrorism and counter-radicalization.
In addition, YouTube is now looking into expanding Jigsaw's Redirect Method to cover more languages. The method redirects people watching terrorist propaganda videos to ones that offer an opposing viewpoint and ones the debunk their message. Since fighting terrorist propaganda online is an ongoing process that needs constant enhancement, YouTube promises to continue working with counter-terrorist NGOs and to continue improving its flagging technology.
