How long does a video remain on YouTube that shouldn’t be there? According to the streaming platform, it is not the most important data in the fight against disinformation, hatred, harassment, conspiracy theories and other banned content. Rather, Colin Goulding, YouTube Director, Trust & Safety explains to La Stampa, “the most critical question to ask in our opinion is: how often is content viewed? A violent video may have been online for 24 hours and had zero views, another may have reached thousands of views in a few hours before being removed. Which of these two ultimately has a greater impact? ” To establish this, YouTube has introduced a new metric: it’s called the Inappropriate View Rate (or VVR, Violative Video Rate).
The Inappropriate View Rate helps determine what percentage of YouTube views are attributable to content that violates the policy. “Our teams – adds Goulding – started monitoring this data in 2017; this is the main metric used to measure our work on the responsibility front “. As investments in people and technology have increased, the rate of inappropriate views has dropped, and now stands between 0.16- and 0.18%, which means that out of 10,000 views on YouTube, those related to infringing content they are 16-18. “This percentage has fallen by more than 70% compared to the same quarter of 2017. In the future, we will update the rate of inappropriate views every quarter as part of our Community Guidelines Enforcement Report.”
Since 2018, when the first was released, the streaming platform has removed over 83 million videos and 7 billion comments that violated community guidelines. The number of content moderators and controllers has increased from 10,000 to 20,000 people and investments in artificial intelligence have grown: today, automatic reporting allows you to detect 94% of all content that violates the rules on YouTube and the 75% of these are removed even before 10 views have been totaled.
“At the heart of this approach – reveals Goulding – there are four orders of responsibility. We remove content as it violates our rules. We reduce the dissemination of false or dangerous information. We bring useful information to the fore and reward reliable creators ”.
That’s enough? No, judging by the dangerous nonsense still to be found about homeopathic treatments for coronavirus. But it is a step in the right direction.