Google Tightens YouTube Against Extremist Content

Countries like Germany, France and Britain where civilians have suffered death and trauma due to terrorism taken up by militants in the past few years have forced social media boards to look into the matter and whatever little they can to cater to the situation. It has forced companies like Google and Facebook to locate and remove hate speech and militant content.  While Google has been looking forward to employing better technology to curb this threat, Facebook is using artificial intelligence like image matching and language understanding to identify and remove such content as quickly as possible.

In a blog post dated Sunday, Google said that it will implement better measures to locate and remove any kind of violent extremist content from YouTube. Prevention is better than cure, and using this ideology Google said that tougher actions will be taken against videos on supremacist and/or inflammatory religious content by either issuing a warning and not monetizing or not recommending them for user endorsements. Google said that the company would do whatever it takes to help build a better tomorrow and hence, the videos that have the slightest of negativity in the above mentioned aspects will be subjected to toughest of action. The measures to achieve this goal are the hiring of more engineering resources, increase in the use of technology to locate extremist videos, training of new content classifiers in order to quickly detect unsuitable content and remove them.

“While we and others have worked for years to identify and remove content that violates our policies, the uncomfortable truth is that we, as an industry, must acknowledge that more needs to be done now,” said Google’s general counsel Kent Walker.

Google is reportedly set to expand its collaboration with the counter-extremist groups to identify content that may be used to realize and recruit extremists. The benefit of such an action would be that when Google starts to reach out to potential Islamic State recruits using targeted online advertising redirecting them towards anti-terrorist videos, chances are this would change their minds about joining such an institution.