Posts Tagged: expanding
Android Auto is expanding to more countries in Europe, Africa, and Asia
Just because we are living in a pandemic world doesn’t mean that driving safely isn’t a priority, after all, it’s illegal to drive while using a smartphone in most countries. This is where Android Auto comes in with its ability to allow users to navigate, make and receive calls, and control their audio entertainment via […]
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Expanding fact checks on YouTube to the United States
Over the past several years, we’ve seen more and more people coming to YouTube for news and information. They want to get the latest on an election, to find multiple perspectives on a topic, or to learn about a major breaking news event. More recently, the outbreak of COVID-19 and its spread around the world has reaffirmed how important it is for viewers to get accurate information during fast-moving events. That’s why we’re continuing to improve the news experience on YouTube, including raising up authoritative sources of information across the site. Today, we’re continuing this work by expanding our fact check information panels — which we launched in Brazil and India last year — to the United States.
The fact check feature expands upon the other ways we raise and connect people with authoritative sources. For example, our Breaking News and Top News shelves help our viewers find information from authoritative sources both on their YouTube homepage and when searching for news topics. In 2018, we introduced information panels that help surface a wide array of contextual information, from links to sources like Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia for topics prone to longstanding misinformation (e.g. “flat earth” theories), or more recently, linking to the WHO, CDC or local health authorities for videos and searches related to COVID-19. We’re now using these panels to help address an additional challenge: Misinformation that comes up quickly as part of a fast-moving news cycle, where unfounded claims and uncertainty about facts are common. (For example, a false report that COVID-19 is a bio-weapon.) Our fact check information panels provide fresh context in these situations by highlighting relevant, third-party fact-checked articles above search results for relevant queries, so that our viewers can make their own informed decision about claims made in the news.
There are a few factors that determine whether a fact check information panel will appear for any given search. Most important, there must be a relevant fact check article available from an eligible publisher. And in order to match a viewer’s needs with the information we provide, fact checks will only show when people search for a specific claim. For example, if someone searches for “did a tornado hit Los Angeles,” they might see a relevant fact check article, but if they search for a more general query like “tornado,” they may not. All fact check articles must also comply with our Community Guidelines, and viewers can send feedback to our team.
Our fact check information panel relies on an open network of third-party publishers and leverages the ClaimReview tagging system. All U.S. publishers are welcome to participate as long as they follow the publicly-available ClaimReview standards and are either a verified signatory of the International Fact-Checking Network’s (IFCN) Code of Principles or are an authoritative publisher. Over a dozen U.S. publishers are participating today, including The Dispatch, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact and The Washington Post Fact Checker, and we encourage more publishers and fact checkers to explore using ClaimReview. In addition to this roll out, YouTube will provide $ 1M through the Google News Initiative to the IFCN to bolster fact-checking and verification efforts across the world. This follows Google’s efforts to support the ecosystem in the midst of the challenging COVID-19 environment, and we’ll be looking for more ways to support the fact check ecosystem in the future.
As always, it will take some time for our systems to fully ramp up. Our systems will become more accurate, and over time, we’ll roll this feature out to more countries. We are committed to our responsibility to protect the YouTube community, and expanding our fact check information panels is one of the many steps we are taking to raise up authoritative sources, provide relevant and authoritative context to our users, and continue to reduce the spread of harmful misinformation on YouTube.
Google’s Phone app expanding support beyond Nexus and Pixel devices
Google has begun allowing select devices from other OEMs to install their Phone dialer app from the Play Store, the latest service they have slowly started opening up. At this point the release cadence for new smart services that Google develops seems pretty clear – they announce and typically launch their new Assistant feature, or […]
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Expanding our work against abuse of our platform
As the CEO of YouTube, I’ve seen how our open platform has been a force for creativity, learning and access to information. I’ve seen how activists have used it to advocate for social change, mobilize protests, and document war crimes. I’ve seen how it serves as both an entertainment destination and a video library for the world. I’ve seen how it has expanded economic opportunity, allowing small businesses to market and sell their goods across borders. And I’ve seen how it has helped enlighten my children, giving them a bigger, broader understanding of our world and the billions who inhabit it.
But I’ve also seen up-close that there can be another, more troubling, side of YouTube’s openness. I’ve seen how some bad actors are exploiting our openness to mislead, manipulate, harass or even harm.
In the last year, we took actions to protect our community against violent or extremist content, testing new systems to combat emerging and evolving threats. We tightened our policies on what content can appear on our platform, or earn revenue for creators. We increased our enforcement teams. And we invested in powerful new machine learning technology to scale the efforts of our human moderators to take down videos and comments that violate our policies.
Now, we are applying the lessons we’ve learned from our work fighting violent extremism content over the last year in order to tackle other problematic content. Our goal is to stay one step ahead of bad actors, making it harder for policy-violating content to surface or remain on YouTube.
More people reviewing more content
Human reviewers remain essential to both removing content and training machine learning systems because human judgment is critical to making contextualized decisions on content. Since June, our trust and safety teams have manually reviewed nearly 2 million videos for violent extremist content, helping train our machine-learning technology to identify similar videos in the future. We are also taking aggressive action on comments, launching new comment moderation tools and in some cases shutting down comments altogether. In the last few weeks we’ve used machine learning to help human reviewers find and terminate hundreds of accounts and shut down hundreds of thousands of comments. Our teams also work closely with NCMEC, the IWF, and other child safety organizations around the world to report predatory behavior and accounts to the correct law enforcement agencies.
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.
At the same time, we are expanding the network of academics, industry groups and subject matter experts who we can learn from and support to help us better understand emerging issues.
Tackling issues at scale
We will use our cutting-edge machine learning more widely to allow us to quickly and efficiently remove content that violates our guidelines. In June we deployed this technology to flag violent extremist content for human review and we’ve seen tremendous progress.
- Since June we have removed over 150,000 videos for violent extremism.
- Machine learning is helping our human reviewers remove nearly five times as many videos than they were previously.
- Today, 98 percent of the videos we remove for violent extremism are flagged by our machine-learning algorithms.
- Our advances in machine learning let us now take down nearly 70 percent of violent extremist content within eight hours of upload and nearly half of it in two hours and we continue to accelerate that speed.
- Since we started using machine learning to flag violent and extremist content in June, the technology has reviewed and flagged content that would have taken 180,000 people working 40 hours a week to assess.
Because we have seen these positive results, we have begun training machine-learning technology across other challenging content areas, including child safety and hate speech.
Greater transparency
We understand that people want a clearer view of how we’re tackling problematic content. Our Community Guidelines give users notice about what we do not allow on our platforms and we want to share more information about how these are enforced. That’s why in 2018 we will be creating a regular report where we will provide more aggregate data about the flags we receive and the actions we take to remove videos and comments that violate our content policies. We are looking into developing additional tools to help bring even more transparency around flagged content.
A new approach to advertising on YouTube
We’re also taking actions to protect advertisers and creators from inappropriate content. We want advertisers to have peace of mind that their ads are running alongside content that reflects their brand’s values. Equally, we want to give creators confidence that their revenue won’t be hurt by the actions of bad actors.
We believe this requires a new approach to advertising on YouTube, carefully considering which channels and videos are eligible for advertising. We are planning to apply stricter criteria, conduct more manual curation, while also significantly ramping up our team of ad reviewers to ensure ads are only running where they should. This will also help vetted creators see more stability around their revenue. It’s important we get this right for both advertisers and creators, and over the next few weeks, we’ll be speaking with both to hone this approach.
We are taking these actions because it’s the right thing to do. Creators make incredible content that builds global fan bases. Fans come to YouTube to watch, share, and engage with this content. Advertisers, who want to reach those people, fund this creator economy. Each of these groups is essential to YouTube’s creative ecosystem—none can thrive on YouTube without the other—and all three deserve our best efforts.
As challenges to our platform evolve and change, our enforcement methods must and will evolve to respond to them. But no matter what challenges emerge, our commitment to combat them will be sustained and unwavering. We will take the steps necessary to protect our community and ensure that YouTube continues to be a place where creators, advertisers, and viewers can thrive.
Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube