Hot growth industry: checking social networks for nasties

YouTube's revealed it will increase the size of its video-nasty-spotting workforce to ten thousand people.

CEO Susan Wojcicki used the fuddy-duddy medium of text to explain that YouTube's recognised that “... some bad actors are exploiting our openness to mislead, manipulate, harass or even harm.”

Wojcicki stated that all of the techniques the video locker has used to combat extremist content have now been turned onto other video nasties.

Machine learning's a part of that effort: Wojcicki said it is “is helping our human reviewers remove nearly five times as many videos than they were previously.”

But even with machines helping out, she said “We will continue the significant growth of our teams into next year, with the goal of bringing the total number of people across Google working to address content that might violate our policies to over 10,000 in 2018.”

Without machine learning, Wojcicki said the site would need 180,000 content-checkers.

Extremist content, fake news and politically-motivated ads have created something of a growth industry: Facebook said it would hire 3,000 content-checkers in May and in October said another 1,000 were needed to do the job right. ®