Here’s how YouTube plans to get rid of hateful videos

YouTube has had its share of problems lately due to the many inappropriate videos aimed at kids that found their way to the website. This caused large brands like Adidas and HP to pull their ads off the video streaming service.

In a blog post, YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki has now explained exactly what the company plans to do in order to minimize the amount of policy-violating content on the website.

She said that the company has begun training machine-learning technology to detect more hateful videos, including those aimed at kids. So far, the technology has only been used to take down violent extremist content. It has proven to be very successful, as Wojcicki claims it allows the company to take down nearly 70 percent of extremist videos within eight hours of upload. With its help, YouTube removed over 150,000 videos since June.

Training the technology across other challenging content areas like child safety and hate speech makes sense. But YouTube will need more manpower to get the job done. That’s why it plans to bring the number of people working in this area to over 10,000 next year.

Wojcicki also announced that YouTube will be more transparent in the future. In 2018, the company will start publishing reports with data regarding the flags it received and the actions it took to remove videos and comments from the website.