Social-Media
YouTube has taken more videos than ever before, relying more on non-human moderators.
As expected, YouTube removed more videos in the second quarter of 2020 than ever before, as the company leaned more on its algorithm than most of its human content moderators. That is according to the Community guidelines Enforcement report released by the company on Tuesday (through the Protocol), which shows that more than 11,4 million videos were recorded between April and June. In the same period last year, just under 9 million videos were removed from YouTube.
When we reckoned with significantly reduced human review capacity due to COVID-19, we were forced to make a choice between potential under-enforcement or potential over-enforcement, the company wrote in a blog post.
Because responsibility is our top priority, we have chosen the latter — using technology to help with some of the work normally done by the reviewers.
Google's parent YouTube company told employees in March that it was extending its homework policy until the end of 2020 due to coronavirus. The company warned that the measure meant that it would rely more on technology than on human reviewers, and that videos that would normally be fine on the platform could end up being deleted in error. Its human moderators work from offices specifically set up for review; allowing such work to be carried out outside the controlled environment would risk having user data — and sensitive videos — inadvertently exposed.
The company knew that removing more videos that did not violate its rules would also result in more appeals from content creators. As a result, it has added more staff to its appeals process to deal with requests as quickly as possible. The number of content take-off appeals went from 166,000 in the first quarter of 2020 to more than 325,000 in the second. It also meant that YouTube had reversed itself and re-established more videos in the second quarter: more than 160,000, compared to just over 41,000 in the first quarter (although YouTube noted in its blog post that some of the re-establishments may have been appealed in the previous quarter).
YouTube reported in its blog post that, for critical policy areas such as child health and violent crime, it had more than triple the number of removals as average during the second quarter, but found the occasional disruption for developers to be worth the end result. We accepted a lower level of accuracy to make sure we removed as many pieces of violative content as possible.
