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.

Comments

Forced into washing machines

[Baron_Yam]

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.

Headline != summary

[ToTheStars]

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!")

Re:Hire ? Just use your "Anti-conservative" folk

[AmiMoJo]

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.