YouTube To Remove 17,000 Channels Over Hate Speech

This week, YouTube announced an update for its effort to eliminate hate speech on its vast global video-sharing platform, and it seems like the company has made some initial progress. YouTube said that over 17,000 channels and 100,000 videos had been axed because of hate speech, which is both great and terrifying at the same time.

The company has made a change in its policies regarding this problem earlier this year with rules like:

YouTube also claimed that it would crack down on videos supporting Nazi ideology and those that refused to recognize “well-documented violent events” like the Holocaust and Sandy Hook.

While many users think that the company should have done this years ago, on the bright side, it is always better late than never.

On the other hand, it is kind of terrifying knowing that there were more than 17,000 channels that have enough hate speech that YouTube had to flag and removed them. And those are just the ones the company can identify.

YouTube has been under fire several times for the way it treats inappropriate content on its platform. Before the new policies were announced, the New York Times’s report detailed how the platform sexualized children by recommending videos with them partially clothed to those who have watched similar content before.

To defend their laxness in dealing with these kinds of content, YouTube and Google executives refers to the magnitude of the site as the reason. Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, in an interview with Axios when the new hate speech policies were introduced, said that YouTube’s scale was as large as the entire Internet.

The site has a team of around 10,000 people to review the content of videos on the platform, and it seems like the size of the department might grow bigger, and everyone still has their hands full of new videos to check.

The circumstances under which the new policies on hate speech take effect should also be taken into consideration. The report about sexualizing children is just one of the accusations YouTube is faced. There is also another one about how the platform lets hate speech targeting a journalist go rampant. At first, the company said that these videos did not violate any of its policies but later changed its opinion.

It was criticized really hard over the consideration of the obvious homophobic content as not violating YouTube’s policies, and all of this happens in the Pride Month. So for many people, the new hate speech policies are warmly welcomed but do not seem to have an immediate effect.

The platform also said that its team’s ability to spot hateful videos had been improved. To show how what they have achieved, its announcement reads:

It goes without saying that YouTube still has a long way to go if it wants to entirely crack down on hate speech on its large platform. The 17,000 channels are a large number, but there are surely more they have missed. There is a chance that it may eliminate the non-hateful channel in this purge, but that is the price we all have to pay.