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YouTube To Hire More Than 10,000 Content Moderators on Staff Next Year To Stop Its Child Exploitation Problem (buzzfeed.com)
YouTube is adding more human moderators and increasing its machine learning in an attempt to curb its child exploitation problem, the company's CEO Susan Wojcicki said. From a report: The company plans to increase its content moderation workforce to more than 10,000 employees in 2018 in order to help screen videos and train the platform's machine learning algorithms to spot and remove problematic children's content. Sources familiar with YouTube's workforce numbers say this represents a 25% increase from where the company is today. In the last two weeks, YouTube has removed hundreds of thousands of videos featuring children in disturbing and possibly exploitative situations, including being duct-taped to walls, mock-abducted, and even forced into washing machines. The company said it will employ the same approach it used this summer as it worked to eradicate violent extremist content from the platform.
Dot dot dot.
... to watch kiddy porn
None of those examples sound particularly exploitative to me. Dangerous maybe, and I guess they're being exploited to earn money, but that's not really what I think of when somebody uses the phrase "exploiting children." Seems to me that if they're really concerned about children being used to generate revenue, then they ought to ban all video of children... problem solved.
First, I hope they're not expecting these people to work too much. Also, the people they hire better not work too much.
#DeleteFacebook
Obvious solution would be to not allow children on the platform in the first place.
But then what about the ill effects of viewing deplorable content nonstop; I am sure their employees will require medical attention, or therapy, at the very least. Hey, why not fast forward and just hand these jobs to robots? What is Youtube stalling for?
I dunno, I tell my kid all the time I'm going to do it. Her eyes always light up and she's like yay do it!
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I don't read AC
If you know a more efficient way to get your kids clean, I'd like to hear it!
Of course, it only works if you have two kids of approximately the same mass, otherwise the drum is unbalanced and the washing machine shakes pretty badly.
It is disturbing that they need 10,000 people to monitor that stuff. What is seriously wrong with the world?
...which is the whole problem.
Youtube will outsource this work to cheap overseas companies staffed by third worlders and muslims.
All they will accomplish is to get 10,000 dirty peasants jacking off to disgusting CP all day as they love that shit.
Their central religious figure was a pedophile rapist for fucks sake !!
Of course they will not be used for anything we'd ever consider censorship. Promise!
Google needs to stop the free ride and take responsibility for the garbage they are spewing out. There is no excuse, they have plenty of money. They can hire many more than 10,000 if they need to and review each and every video.
They do a great job demonetizing conservatives almost instantly. They also do a great job at redirecting search requests and making sure to insert Pro-progressive content into suggestions. Oh and they also do a great job randomly unsubscribing people from conservative channels, as well as simply not providing notifications.
It's funny how Youtube is so efficient when it comes to defending their CEO's "Progressive" ideology, but are so inept at making Youtube Kids simply a curated list of channels instead of a free-for-all that requires monitoring.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
The headline says "hire more than 10,000", but the summary says "*increase to more than* 10,000", and TFA (yeah, I know) says this is "a 25% increase from where the company is today." So, they're actually hiring a couple thousand new workers. Given the nature of the problem, I'm not sure that increasing their content moderation staff by a factor of essentially unity (1.25x) is going to solve things -- YouTube's machine learning approach to removing violent extremist content (with all the attendant hiccups) did the equivalent of over 180,000 people working full-time -- but maybe these new 2,000 will be put to work specifically on training a machine learning algorithm for finding and removing exploitative content. (Cripes, that must be a heck of a job ad -- "Come work for YouTube! Be one of 2,000 new hires looking at sick content where kids get hurt, all for the purpose of training an AI to make yourself obsolete!")
If only they'd put this much effort into preventing unauthorized videos from appearing on the platform.
Of course if they did this, they'd lose 75% of their business so it's easier and more profitable to just appease the screaming social media masses by removing a few videos with questionable content.
I'd love to see YouTube /Google/alphabet go down due to all of the copyright infringement that they support on a daily basis. Hypocritical bastards!
That's how political censorship and propaganda get past common sense
Google's censoring arm is getting longer......
If you start filtering videos for children then you have the system in place for the next step after that: filtering videos for adults.
#DeleteFacebook
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The only thing convincing me, this was posted by a human rather than by a bot using canned pro-censorship arguments, are the grammar and syntax errors...
Congratulations on passing the Turing Test. Now, would somebody, please, think of the children?!!
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Wouldn't they be driving the behavior underground? There needs to be investigations on the people uploading this crap.
It's not just conservatives. Being gay or trans is pretty much guaranteed to get you demonetized. Being progressive or left leaning doesn't help either.
Musicians get hit pretty badly. Their original compositions often get flagged for copyright as well as demonetized.
It's not an anti-conservative conspiracy, it affects everyone.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Will the yt policies translate well to whatever countries they decide to employe the thought police in?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Responsibility? *Hmmm* [Laurence Fishburne smirk]
the 1099er will be on there own to foot there legal bill and no YouTube will not pay you for any cop time or any jail or court time.
There are plenty of liberals that have demonetized. I know a few left leaning folks (that are not left enough) that don't buy into the whole SJW ideology and have made critique videos that have had their ads turned off.
making sure to insert Pro-progressive content into suggestions
You see a conspiracy. I see simple demographics. Most of youtube's user base is young and computer literate. That's a demographic that is naturally progressive compared to other groups.
If you're so right-wing that you're implying youtube has a nefarious progressive political bias to it, yeah, every video might seem "pro-progressive." That's your deal, not youtube.
Remember when you said that retiring to mexico and marrying an "underage sweet thing" was "about getting the most for your retirement dollar" ?
Fuck off and leave slashdot asshole. Anyhow you don't know the first thing about machine learning and you never learned anything more than the most rudimentary algorithms. Why do you think anyone cares what the fuck you say you fat pervert piece of trash.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
He says moving to mexico to marry an "UNDERAGE SWEET THING" is "GETTING THE MOST BANG FOR YOUR RETIREMENT DOLLAR"
He also spams amazon links all over the fucking place.
they could just focus on the child exploiters? might save resources.
I suspect that just as you were unfairly downmodded for stating what has been obvious to anyone who gets a variety of viewpoints and independent news from youtube, that so-called progressives are very eager to censor any opinion that falls outside of their doctrine. So Youtube already has a volunteer army to abuse the reporting system and put a spotlight on videos for demonetization when it comes to conservatives, regardless of whether or not their algorithm dislikes the wording of the video's title.
As an aside, I know I was targeted for reeducation when I started getting 'recommended channels' such as 'youtube creators for change'. Such highly emotionally driven videos with plenty of cultural egalitarianism bullshit sprinkled on top are as difficult to suffer through as those dedicated to recruiting religious followers.
That sounds like a terrible job. They're going to need brain bleach, and they'll still slowly go crazy...
If it effects everyone, then it's by default an anti-nazi, err..., conservative conspiracy.
The right thing to do is to investigate and prosecute the global elite's involvement in pedo rings. Pedophilia is the fabric that binds the establishment together. Censoring a bunch of youtube videos doesn't solve the problem. It only means that the average Joe won't see the terrible crimes that the so-called 'elite' are really involved in.
Cry me a river, your white male tears over not getting as many recommendations in your youtube videos are very low in my list of priorities considering that transpeople are being killed on the streets and we have a literal white supremacist fascist running the country and trying to build a secret police.
Most of youtube's user base is young and computer literate. That's a demographic that is naturally progressive compared to other groups.
Nah, boomers are more progressive, especially boomers related to show biz and Hollywood (see: all the recent scandals coming out). How did you think progressivism got so far? They've been voting for it before the current young and computer literate were born.
The few young and computer literate progressives are found in groups like anti-gamegaters... who somehow have quite a few sexual predators among them. It's almost as if there's a correlation between being a progressive and being a sexual predator.
Most young and computer literate people are more like the OP, who is very anti-SJW, as evident in the comments section in stories like this.
It takes 10,000 censors to take down 1 video? Are people that stupid to know what these censors really represent?
There are plenty of liberals that have demonetized. I know a few left leaning folks (that are not left enough) that don't buy into the whole SJW ideology and have made critique videos that have had their ads turned off.
Anything right of Yvette Felarca is considered a conservative these days.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
The answer is simple.
Google is complicit in the exploitation of children.
This user is a Pedobear Troll! Hide your chikdren and goats!
Using humans on this scale to train their garbage, scrambled-together AI is not going to work. The AI will make associations that aren't there and jump to conclusions based on coincidence. This is not how you train an AI and as a gigantic youtube channel owner and operations, I assure you, the AI has gotten less accurate every week since they implemented it. It's basically the "correlation is not causation" in AI form. It'll start associating the words "like and subscribe" and wearing red shirts as clues to content being offensive based on random chance because it's just processing yes or no decisions that humans made and having zero guidance.
Viewing them too much can be bad for their minds. :/
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
OMG, Susan Wojcicki is that you?
Fact free post is easily disproved
No one here has goats and we have no idea what "chikdren" are, Chris. Is this some kind of autistic echolalia? Is it part of the spectrum of symptoms you've been diagnosed with?
Not that I'm into watching videos of kids getting stuffed into washing machines-but come on. I'm highly doubtful these videos are anything other than humorous harmless entertainment. 2nd these algorithms have really screwed things up making it extremely difficult to publish content. Most of what has happened is we've ended up reducing the amount of non-commercially produced content that is available to watch because of crummy algorithms demoting, demonetizing, and undermining the small entertainment producers. It's fundamentally undermining freedom of speech via government through copy"right" legislation. If it was exclusively YouTube doing it for its own reasons it might be censorship-ish-but not a constitutional issue.
I'm talking about the people producing thousands (often individually or amongst a small number of people) of quality videos here outside of having a major entertainment company backing em. I am one such producer. I'm a co-host on a radio show and spend hundreds of days each year filming protests, cops (think that 1990s era Cops show, but from the opposite and a real world perspective, that is the real world implication of how it damages those whom harm no one and have no victims, ie most police interactions), court cases, and state house legislative hearings in New Hampshire. That might seem boring to you, but it actually gets quite entertaining at times.
Do a YouTube search for "Military Veteran and State Rep OWNS Judge in Court!". It is well worth it. Basically one of our state reps here in New Hampshire doesn't believe in drivers licenses and license plates and so he drove without either and his trial was amazingly funny because the judge couldn't really do anything about his antics- antics that would get ANYBODY else thrown in jail for contempt. The bailiff even threatened us- the media for filming- using some made up excuse about "victims" when it was a day when they only heard arraignments so unless the victims are those they are persecuting for victimless crimes... he basically was making stuff up. One media corespondent ignored his threat, and guess what- the judge didn't do anything. Any other time the judge probably would have thrown you in jail. Though the two people or anybody who is with them acting on behalf of that media outlet have special authorized access to record because of other lawsuits that went to higher courts which related to being denied in the past by lower courts the right to film. Other outlet have to ask permission first.
There is another video coming out today that'll probably be pretty funny. It's basically Vermon Supreme trolling Hillary supporters at a NH book signing where there are counter protesters. Vermon Surpreme is all about ponies for everyone! The pony economy is his solution to all our problems. It should be available on that same YouTube channel.
Are you one of those people who spew numbers that claim transpeople, despite making up less than 1% of the population, make up 130% of homicide victims?
Yes, this was an actual thing for a while.