San Francisco Mayor London Breed and Susan Wojcicki |
Today, CEO Susan Wojcicki stood with San Francisco Mayor London Breed at Hamilton Families, a nonprofit organization that supports families experiencing homelessness, and announced a combined grant of $ 1.35 million to the program. The grant comes from Google.org and from Wojcicki and her husband, Dennis Troper.
Here are her remarks from this afternoon:
“Thank you, Mayor Breed. I’m so glad to be here with you, and all of your leadership in fighting homelessness. I also wanted to say thank you to everyone here at Hamilton Families and the impact you’ve had in our community and in the lives of so many families.
Sometimes the scale of an issue can make us feel like it’s impossible to solve.
And even though we know it’s important, we wind up doing nothing because it feels overwhelming for us.
The work at Hamilton Families shows how we can make a difference in a tangible way, one family at a time.
Over the years, I’ve always recognized how serious a problem of homelessness is in the Bay Area, and I’ve contributed — along with my husband — to support many local organizations that help meet the needs of people experiencing homelessness.
I’m here today because of an idea that first started with a school project. Earlier this year, my daughter worked on a project about homelessness.
As I listened to her questions and reactions, I realized I didn’t have a lot of answers for something that was so important and affecting so many families. We spent time researching different solutions, including coming here, and that’s how we got in touch with Hamilton Families.
We were impressed by the services offered here that give families a fresh start.
And that’s why we’re gathered today — to announce a new grant to further support all the incredible efforts done by Hamilton Families to find families permanent homes, and along the way meet their needs by providing shelter, meals, and more. We appreciate everything you do, from offering counseling and job resources to giving children the chance to succeed at school.
Today, Google.org is contributing $ 850,000. And together with my husband, Dennis, we’re contributing $ 500,000 — for a total of $ 1.35 million to boost the work of Hamilton Families.
Over the next year, this grant will make an impact in our communities, and it will help Hamilton serve 700 families and find housing for another 200.
And it will also fund an outreach effort — a series of videos and podcasts — that will tell the stories of individuals who are facing homelessness.
Our goal is to help the community understand the problems that can lead to homelessness and also inspire others to get involved in whatever way they can.
Sometimes, the greatest gift we can offer is our time. And in that spirit, next year, we will organize an event for the YouTube employees to come to the shelter. We’re very excited about that.
Homelessness is an incredibly complicated challenge for our society. But if we all come together to look out for one another, our combined contributions can make a big difference.”
Responsibility is our number one priority, and chief among our areas of focus is protecting minors and families. Over the years, we’ve heavily invested in a number of technologies and efforts to protect young people on our platform, such as our CSAI Match technology. And in 2015, because YouTube has never been for kids under 13, we created YouTube Kids as a way for kids to be able to safely explore their interests and for parents to have more control. Accounts belonging to people under 13 are terminated when discovered. In fact, we terminate thousands of accounts per week as part of this process.
We also enforce a strong set of policies to protect minors on our platform, including those that prohibit exploiting minors, encouraging dangerous or inappropriate behaviors, and aggregating videos of minors in potentially exploitative ways. In the first quarter of 2019 alone, we removed more than 800,000 videos for violations of our child safety policies, the majority of these before they had ten views.
The vast majority of videos featuring minors on YouTube, including those referenced in recent news reports, do not violate our policies and are innocently posted — a family creator providing educational tips, or a parent sharing a proud moment. But when it comes to kids, we take an extra cautious approach towards our enforcement and we’re always making improvements to our protections. Here are a few updates we’ve made over the past several months:
Over the last 2+ years, we’ve been making regular improvements to the machine learning classifier that helps us protect minors and families. We rolled out our most recent improvement earlier this month. With this update, we’ll be able to better identify videos that may put minors at risk and apply our protections, including those described above, across even more videos.
To stay informed of the latest research and advances in child safety, we work with civil society and law enforcement. In the last two years, we’ve shared tens of thousands of reports with NCMEC, leading to numerous law enforcement investigations.1 Additionally, we share our technologies and expertise with the industry, and consult with outside experts to complement our team of in-house experts.
YouTube is a company made up of parents and families, and we’ll always do everything we can to prevent any use of our platform that attempts to exploit or endanger minors. Kids and families deserve the best protection we have to offer: We’re committed to investing in the teams and technology to make sure they get it.
—The YouTube Team
1 Updated stats on June 3
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In recent months, we’ve noticed a growing trend around content on YouTube that attempts to pass as family-friendly, but is clearly not. While some of these videos may be suitable for adults, others are completely unacceptable, so we are working to remove them from YouTube. Here’s what we’re doing:
Across the board we have scaled up resources to ensure that thousands of people are working around the clock to monitor, review and make the right decisions across our ads and content policies. These latest enforcement changes will take shape over the weeks and months ahead as we work to tackle this evolving challenge. We’re wholly committed to addressing these issues and will continue to invest the engineering and human resources needed to get it right. As a parent and as a leader in this organization, I’m determined that we do.
Johanna Wright, Vice President of Product Management at YouTube