PTC Applauds YouTube Bolstering Content Monitoring

Google's plans to increase employees monitoring problematic YouTube content is "a great first step," the Parents Television Council said Tuesday. It said its own research finding that offensive content often comes up when searching using "child-friendly" search terms shows the site "needs constant monitoring," and Google's increased efforts should help meet that goal. PTC said Google's YouTube should extend increased monitoring to its YouTube Kids app and content. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki blogged Monday that the company has more people reviewing more content "to stay one step ahead of bad actors." She said its trust and safety teams have manually reviewed nearly 2 million videos for violent extremist content since June, helping train its machine-learning technology to identify similar videos. She said the goal is to have more than 10,000 people working at Google next year on content that might violate YouTube policies. She said YouTube regularly will report more aggregate data about the flags it receives and the actions it takes to remove videos and comments that violate its content policies starting next year, and is looking to develop other tools. She said the company plans to apply stricter criteria, do more manual curation and add to its team of advertising reviewers.