YouTube puts human content moderators back to work

The humans are tagging in.

YouTube is re-assigning the work of content moderation to more actual humans, Neal Mohan, YouTube’s chief product officer, told the Financial Times.

At the start of the pandemic, YouTube had to reduce the staff and workload of in-office human moderators. So rather relying on that 10,000-person workforce, the company gave broader content moderation power to automated systems that are be able to recognize videos with harmful content and remove them immediately. 

That led to the removal of 11 million videos between April and June, a higher number than usual. However, YouTube's AI systems erred on the side of caution, which meant they removed more videos that actually broke no rules.  Read more...