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YouTube combating online terror content with machine learning

YouTube Official Blog: An update on our commitment to fight terror content online, August 1, 2017: “A little over a month ago, we told you about the four new steps we’re taking to combat terrorist content on YouTube: better detection and faster removal driven by machine learning, more experts to alert us to content that needs review, tougher standards for videos that are controversial but do not violate our policies, and more work in the counter-terrorism space. We wanted to give you an update on these commitments: Better detection and faster removal driven by machine learning: We’ve always used a mix of technology and human review to address the ever-changing challenges around controversial content on YouTube. We recently began developing and implementing cutting-edge machine learning technology designed to help us identify and remove violent extremism and terrorism-related content in a scalable way. We have started rolling out these tools and we are already seeing some positive progress:

  • Speed and efficiency: Our machine learning systems are faster and more effective than ever before. Over 75 percent of the videos we’ve removed for violent extremism over the past month were taken down before receiving a single human flag.
  • Accuracy: The accuracy of our systems has improved dramatically due to our machine learning technology. While these tools aren’t perfect, and aren’t right for every setting, in many cases our systems have proven more accurate than humans at flagging videos that need to be removed.
  • Scale: With over 400 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute, finding and taking action on violent extremist content poses a significant challenge. But over the past month, our initial use of machine learning has more than doubled both the number of videos we’ve removed for violent extremism, as well as the rate at which we’ve taken this kind of content down…”

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