YouTube, the video- sharing site owned by Google, is employing additional people to help review content before and after it goes live, following a spate of al-Qaeda videos which it was forced to take down.
Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, said that the company was “adding people to do reviews of videos” as it is very hard algorithmically to monitor inappropriate comment. Talking to a small group of journalists at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, he went further and said that it was “impossible” to monitor 100 per cent of the content the site receives, which is why YouTube has to rely upon a mixture of algorithm-driven detection and its community to report inappropriate content.
The question whether YouTube needs to be more proactively edit the video-sharing site, to which 35 hours of content are uploaded to per minute, has come to the fore following the removal of several al-Qaeda videos which promoted violence.
Two weeks ago YouTube began removing al-Qaeda videos from its website after the British Government contacted the White House to complain about the material.
A number of clips by Anwar al-Awlaki, believed to have been the mastermind of the cargo bomb plot, were deleted from the video-sharing site. However scores more, including incendiary calls to wage war on non-Muslims, remain.
A Google search for one of the most provocative videos - entitled 44 Ways to Support Jihad - on Google brings up more than a hundred results from YouTube. Several of the top results have now been blocked although the bulk of the rest remain available.
Users clicking on the deleted content were confronted with a message saying: “This video has been removed because its content violated YouTube’s terms of service.”
A spokesman for YouTube, at the time, said it was looking into the Awlaki videos and would “remove all those which break our rules”.
He said the website had “community guidelines that prohibit dangerous or illegal activities such as bomb-making, hate speech or incitement to commit specific and serious acts of violence”.