Considering a wave of terrorist attacks in the recent months, Google has outlined four steps it’s taking in order to fight online terrorism. The pledge came via an op-ed in the Financial Times, posted by Kent Walker, Google’s senior vice-president, and general counsel, admitting the scope and scale of its Google and YouTube platform.
Throughout the entire post, he paid attention to Google’s intention to attain balance free and open societies and prevention of online terrorism, which aims to dissipate these same values.
The steps to take
According to Walker, the first step should be to improve the company’s identification software by assigning more engineering resources and advanced machine learning. The software will be used to identify improper videos automatically and differentiate between publicity of terrorist content equitable reports on such content by reputable journalistic networks.
The second step is to double the amount of Non-Government Organizations (NGO), which are already functioning and backing them up financially with operational grants for increasing its amount of Trusted Flaggers on YouTube. Although there’s a possibility a great deal of content flagged as inappropriate will not be accurate, demands that more than 90 percent of its flags from this group of independent experts are exact.
The third one is perhaps the most remarkable for the average YouTube users. The online video giant “will be taking a tougher stance on videos that do not clearly violate [its] policies.”
“We think this strikes the right balance between free expression and access to information without promoting extremely offensive viewpoints,” said Walker.
And lastly, Walker says the company will take proactive measure in counter-radicalization. To be more specific, YouTube will increase its existing efforts from its Creators for Change and Jigsaw projects to implement the “Redirect Method”- a program that uses YouTube and Adwords to redirect targeted Isis recruitment advertisements to anti-terrorist videos.
