Youtube Claims Their AI Takes Down 94 Percent Of Rule-Breaking Videos Before Anyone Sees Them

YouTube is claiming that it is getting better at spotting and removing videos that break its rules against disinformation, hate speech and other banned content. The Google-owned video service said 0.16 percent to 0.18 percent of all the video views on its platform during the fourth quarter of 2020 were on content that broke its rules. That’s down 70 percent from the same period in 2017, the year the company began tracking it.

In the years since, as scrutiny from lawmakers intensified and employees of YouTube, Facebook and other major social networks began questioning their own executives, the companies have taken a more active role in policing their platforms. Facebook and YouTube have both hired thousands of new moderators to review and take down posts. The companies have also invested more in artificial intelligence that scans each post and video, automatically blocking content that has already been categorized as breaking the rules.

At YouTube, AI takes down 94 percent of rule-breaking videos before anyone sees them, the company says.

YouTube’s Mohan said the company doesn’t target specific accounts, but rather evaluates each video separately. If an account repeatedly uploads videos that break the rules, it faces an escalating set of restrictions, including temporary bans and removal from the program that gives video makers a cut of advertising money. Three strikes within a 90-day period results in a permanent ban.

Google has unveiled a new metric called Violative View Rate (VVR) and it tracks how many views on YouTube happen on videos that violate its guidelines and should be taken down. This figure is essentially a way for YouTube to measure how good it’s doing at moderating its own site, based on its own rules. The higher the VVR, the more problematic videos are spreading before YouTube can catch them; the lower the VVR, the better YouTube is doing at stamping out prohibited content.