YouTube plans to hire more reviewers to watch videos and point out explicit content after the company received heavy backlash for its child content.
As the Deseret News reported, YouTube fell under fire for having videos for children that contain violent and sexual themes. Many of these videos included comments with other explicit material.
In response, the company deleted thousands of videos from its service, BuzzFeed News reported.
And the company announced in a blog post on Monday that it will increase its number of reviewers to nearly 10,000 next year, hoping to weed out many of these videos.
"Human reviewers remain essential to both removing content and training machine learning systems because human judgment is critical to making contextualized decisions on content," YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said in the blog post.
Common Sense Media CEO James Steyer said recently that hiring more people will help fix the problem, according to CBS News.
"At the end of the day, large tech companies are run by the bottom line, and I think YouTube has been an incredibly successful platform for Google, and they have simply not paid enough attention to some of the bad stuff that happens on that platform," he said.
In a statement emailed to the Deseret News, PTC President Tim Winter said he supported YouTube's decision to add more human reviewers.
We applaud Googles decision to increase monitoring of violent and extreme content both the videos and comments on YouTube. This is a great first step towards not only protecting advertisers, but also protecting the health and safety of young viewers who may be watching. Our past research on YouTube found that children entering child-friendly search terms were confronted with highly offensive content in the text commentary posted by other site users. YouTube continues to be a site that needs constant monitoring, and todays announcement should assist with that goal, Winter said.
But theres another set of videos on YouTube that is still a trouble spot, according to USA Today. Called YouTube Poop, the genre of videos include popular cartoons and characters and adds a soundtrack of explicit material over it.
Though some of the videos are unavailable to young people because of age restrictions, others like a rip-off of Let It Go from Frozen that talks about crude sexual acts are easily viewable for children. That Frozen video has nearly 2 million views.
USA Today identified these videos to YouTube, which later made them age-restricted and were taken down.
YouTube continues to monitor these videos, saying it will take down any mature videos that are flagged as inappropriate.
Corrine O'Neill, a producer of children's cartoons for her WildCanadaKids YouTube channel, told USA Today that childrens videos will always rise to the top. Its important for YouTube not to promote these explicit videos, she said.
"The YouTube algorithm is a chum factory," she said. "It rewards quantity over quality. It's YouTube promoting these videos that brought them to people."
Advertisers, like Adidas and Hewlett-Packard, left YouTube amid the backlash over child content. All year, reports said that YouTube videos tried to lure children into them with pictures of popular cartoons, only to reveal dark and disturbing content, the Deseret News reported.
The fake videos often fooled parents.
YouTube currently receives 400 hours of video every minute, according to USA Today. Experts said its current method of review, which relies on artificial intelligence, doesnt work well enough to catch all of these videos.
As the Deseret News reported, YouTube fell under fire for having videos for children that contain violent and sexual themes. Many of these videos included comments with other explicit material.
In response, the company deleted thousands of videos from its service, BuzzFeed News reported.
And the company announced in a blog post on Monday that it will increase its number of reviewers to nearly 10,000 next year, hoping to weed out many of these videos.
"Human reviewers remain essential to both removing content and training machine learning systems because human judgment is critical to making contextualized decisions on content," YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said in the blog post.
Common Sense Media CEO James Steyer said recently that hiring more people will help fix the problem, according to CBS News.
"At the end of the day, large tech companies are run by the bottom line, and I think YouTube has been an incredibly successful platform for Google, and they have simply not paid enough attention to some of the bad stuff that happens on that platform," he said.
In a statement emailed to the Deseret News, PTC President Tim Winter said he supported YouTube's decision to add more human reviewers.
We applaud Googles decision to increase monitoring of violent and extreme content both the videos and comments on YouTube. This is a great first step towards not only protecting advertisers, but also protecting the health and safety of young viewers who may be watching. Our past research on YouTube found that children entering child-friendly search terms were confronted with highly offensive content in the text commentary posted by other site users. YouTube continues to be a site that needs constant monitoring, and todays announcement should assist with that goal, Winter said.
But theres another set of videos on YouTube that is still a trouble spot, according to USA Today. Called YouTube Poop, the genre of videos include popular cartoons and characters and adds a soundtrack of explicit material over it.
Though some of the videos are unavailable to young people because of age restrictions, others like a rip-off of Let It Go from Frozen that talks about crude sexual acts are easily viewable for children. That Frozen video has nearly 2 million views.
USA Today identified these videos to YouTube, which later made them age-restricted and were taken down.
YouTube continues to monitor these videos, saying it will take down any mature videos that are flagged as inappropriate.
Corrine O'Neill, a producer of children's cartoons for her WildCanadaKids YouTube channel, told USA Today that childrens videos will always rise to the top. Its important for YouTube not to promote these explicit videos, she said.
"The YouTube algorithm is a chum factory," she said. "It rewards quantity over quality. It's YouTube promoting these videos that brought them to people."
Advertisers, like Adidas and Hewlett-Packard, left YouTube amid the backlash over child content. All year, reports said that YouTube videos tried to lure children into them with pictures of popular cartoons, only to reveal dark and disturbing content, the Deseret News reported.
The fake videos often fooled parents.
YouTube currently receives 400 hours of video every minute, according to USA Today. Experts said its current method of review, which relies on artificial intelligence, doesnt work well enough to catch all of these videos.
