Many fear conservatives in crosshairs Many fear conservatives in crosshairs.
Google plans to hire over 10,000 workers to weed out “inappropriate content” on Youtube after the company was criticized for failing to moderate pedophile comments on videos of children.
The announcement came from Youtube CEO Susan Wojcicki Monday, who ambiguously claimed “bad actors” were exploiting the site to “mislead, manipulate, harass or even harm.”
“Our goal is to stay one step ahead of bad actors, making it harder for policy-violating content to surface or remain on YouTube,” Wojcicki stated .
“We will continue the significant growth of our teams into next year, with the goal of bringing the total number of people across Google working to address content that might violate our policies to over 10,000 in 2018.”
The online video-hosting platform was recently forced to pull 2 million videos over inappropriate content, in addition to 150,000 videos featuring children after the BBC pointed out many contained lewd comments of a pedophilic nature which were not being removed despite being reported.
Reports last week also showed how Youtube’s auto-predict search feature was bringing up disturbing suggestions such as “how to have s*x with your kids” and “how to have s*x kids.”
The multiple infractions have caused headaches for Youtube as advertisers flee for fear their products might be associated with the problematic issues.
While the company’s efforts on the surface appear genuine, many worry the moderator army will also be used to more stringently censor purveyors of conservative, or otherwise unpopular political opinions.
Last week for instance, Youtube censored a viral video from Infowars’ Paul Joseph Watson criticizing the political atmosphere which has led to an influx of viral videos protesting radical Islam.
Meanwhile, the company continues to focus on demoting content from alternative news outlets including Infowars, as highlighted recently by a Project Veritas undercover sting, in which a Youtube operative admitted that content from “Alex Jones” is purposely buried in search results .
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