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posted by n1 on Wednesday June 21 2017, @11:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the google-goes-to-war dept.

Google will step up efforts to censor terrorism-related content on YouTube and its other services. The company says it will take four steps to address violent extremism online:

We will now devote more engineering resources to apply our most advanced machine learning research to train new "content classifiers" to help us more quickly identify and remove extremist and terrorism-related content.

[...] [We] will greatly increase the number of independent experts in YouTube's Trusted Flagger programme. Machines can help identify problematic videos, but human experts still play a role in nuanced decisions about the line between violent propaganda and religious or newsworthy speech. While many user flags can be inaccurate, Trusted Flagger reports are accurate over 90 per cent of the time and help us scale our efforts and identify emerging areas of concern. We will expand this programme by adding 50 expert NGOs to the 63 organisations who are already part of the programme, and we will support them with operational grants.

[...] [We] will be taking a tougher stance on videos that do not clearly violate our policies — for example, videos that contain inflammatory religious or supremacist content. In future these will appear behind an interstitial warning and they will not be monetised, recommended or eligible for comments or user endorsements.

[...] Finally, YouTube will expand its role in counter-radicalisation efforts. Building on our successful Creators for Change programme promoting YouTube voices against hate and radicalisation, we are working with Jigsaw to implement the "Redirect Method" more broadly across Europe. This promising approach harnesses the power of targeted online advertising to reach potential Isis recruits, and redirects them towards anti-terrorist videos that can change their minds about joining. In previous deployments of this system, potential recruits have clicked through on the ads at an unusually high rate, and watched over half a million minutes of video content that debunks terrorist recruiting messages.

Human video flaggers are paid to skim and evaluate hours worth of content in mere minutes (seconds?). But paying NGOs to watch YouTube all day could improve the situation. I would like to remind any potential terrorists reading this summary to "bomb violence with mercy".

Reported at Bloomberg and NYT.


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  • (Score: 2) by Unixnut on Wednesday June 21 2017, @08:44PM

    by Unixnut (5779) on Wednesday June 21 2017, @08:44PM (#529196)

    Aaah, thank you! Much better.

    The data however is US only. The USA has very many miles of sea between the middle east and the majority of Muslims. Those suffering most are in the middle east, and to a lesser extent in Europe and Africa. Ideally would need data on the whole world to do a proper like for like comparison, but I suspect the number of victims due to Islamic extremism would still be magnitudes bigger than the rest.

    However even within the USA, I notice the records actually start on the 15th September, ignoring 9/11, which was one of the biggest Islamic attacks on US soil. if we take into account the years 2001 to 2015 as a whole, then the true numbers look like this:

    Right-Wing/Anti-government/Racist Attacks:

    Number of
    incidents: 62
    Total
    victims: 106

    Islamic Attacks:

    Number of
    Incidents: 24
    Total
    Victims: 3,115

    Quite a bit different, eh? I didn't update the victims for the whole of 2001 for the other attacks, but if in a period of 15 years there were 106 victims, we can say there were around 7 victims per year. So we can up the victims to 113 for Right-Wing/Anti-government/Racist attacks (which again, does not necessary mean religiously motivated attacks).

    On context, actually, 7 victims per year from the other extremist nuts in a country of ~150,000,000 people is actually pretty good. There will always be some tiny percentage of nuts in any population.

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