YouTube Hires 10,000 Staff To Weed Out ‘Extremist’ Content

ZeroHedge.com

Google has announced the latest escalation in its battle to censor “extremist” content on its platforms, a covert campaign to censor conservative voices.

The company plans to hire 10,000 staffers whose sole jobs will be tracking down extremist content that might violate Youtube’s terms of service, according to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki.

Wojcicki said that “bad actors” had used the video-sharing site to “mislead, manipulate, harass or even harm” others.

Per the Hill, the announcement comes after British Prime Minister Theresa May pressured social media companies to remove radical content after a series of deadly terror-related attacks this year in the United Kingdom.

“The tech companies have made significant progress on this issue, but we need to go further and faster to reduce the time it takes to reduce terrorist content online,” May said in a speech to the United Nations in October, according to reports.

But anybody hired to scour Google’s platforms for extremist content and posts planted by Russian bots shouldn’t count on being in the job for long. Google is presently developing an algorithm to automate most of the job.

Wojcicki said they have developed a “computer-learning” technology that helps them to quickly identify and then remove radical content on a site that has hundreds of minutes of video uploaded each minute, according to the report.

The technology can be used to weed out other inappropriate videos, including ones that contain inappropriate or exploitive content involving children, which YouTube has also been trying to weed out.

YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have all faced calls to increase their oversight on possible extremist content.

Back in August, YouTube announced it would be taking steps to censor content they found to be “controversial” even if it didn’t break any laws or violate the site’s user agreement. And while the message vowed to be part of an effort to “fight terror content online,” the move was met wth widespread skepticism among YouTuber’s as nothing more than a thinly-veiled attempt to censor conservative speech.

YouTube’s “punishment” for users who express purportedly controversial conservative views is to economically punish the content creator by “demonetizing” their content by labeling it “not suitable for all advertisers.” The site even censored former Congressman Ron Paul when he spoke out about the Trump administration’s plans to increase the troop levels in Afghanistan, a decision that had been celebrated as “presidential” by both the left and the right. 

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http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-05/youtube-hires-10000-staff-weed-out-extremist-content

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