According to the official blog post on YouTube, the popular video-sharing website has taken some stringent steps to protect families on YouTube and YouTube kids. In recent months, YouTube has observed that many ill-users are violating or deceiving its rules and regulations and are uploading content that appear to be family-friendly but in reality, they possess some objectionable content.
Johanna Wright, Vice President of Product management at YouTube said, “While some of these videos may be suitable for adults, others are completely unacceptable, so we are working to remove them from YouTube.” Through the blog post, she indicated that YouTube is going to toughen its approach toward the illegal or adult content uploaders in order to protect the families on YouTube and YouTube Kids. It shared some details about the stringent steps that it has decided to take to make content uploading more tough for those who are constantly uploading adult or objectionable content. It informed that it would toughen the application of its Community Guidelines and fasten the enforcement through technology.
Wright said that they always had stringent policies against child endangerment and it has partnered with the regional authorities as well as experts to help them enforce all these strict policies and report to law enforcement through NMEC. “In the last couple of weeks we expanded our enforcement guidelines around removing content featuring minors that may be endangering a child, even if that was not the uploader’s intent,” stated Wright in the official blog post. Wright again informed through the blog post that YouTube terminated more than 50 channels in the last week and removed thousands of videos that did not follow the guidelines. It has also pledged to work every day in order to eliminate the objectionable content from its website. It informed that it also implemented policies to age restrict content with family entertainment characters but containing mature themes or adult humor characters.
Wright further informed that to detect potentially violative content more efficiently, they are focusing on applying machine learning technology and automated tools. They have also decided to remove ads from inappropriate and objectionable videos targeting families. Since June, YouTube has removed ads from 3M videos that contain content depicting family entertainment characters involved in violent, offensive or inappropriate behavior, even if done for the purpose of comedy or satire. Along with that, it has also started blocking inappropriate comments on videos that are targeted towards minors. Apart from that, to make people aware of the video-sharing policies, it has provided guidance for creators who make family friendly content.
To help it better understand about how to treat some confusing or challenging content, YouTube has decided to increase the number of experts to work with and also to double the number of trusted Flaggers they partner with, in the content checking area. In her conclusion, Wright said that they are committed to making right decisions across the ads and content policies and will continue to address these sensitive issues more efficiently by investing more in engineering and human resources.
