[EXPLOSION]

This is a war that’s being uploaded

on the internet every day.

Evidence of crimes against humanity and war crimes.

FIfty-eight countries urged the United Nations

to refer these war crimes to the International Criminal

Court.

Content moderation is kind of like the referee

of the internet –

calling what’s in and out of bounds and removing

inappropriate posts.

Let’s say I’m on a YouTube binge

and I see a video with child porn in it.

I report it to YouTube.

That’s called flagging.

The video then gets sent to content

moderators whose job it is to review flagged videos.

And they then decide whether to leave it up or remove it

from the platform.

Well, it got complicated in 2017.

That year, YouTube started relying much more

on machine-learning technology to flag content.

“No amount of people that we can hire

will be enough to review all of the content.

We now have A.I. systems that can identify and take down

99 percent of the Al Qaeda- and ISIS-related content

in our system before someone, a human, even flags it us.

I think we need to do more of that.”

Now, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter

get a huge amount of content uploaded

to their sites every day.

YouTube gets 300 hours uploaded per minute.

These companies are under a ton

of pressure from governments to quickly

get rid of the harmful stuff.

But it’s become a double-edged sword,

and essential human rights content

is getting caught in the net.

The bottom line is, computers may

be good at detecting violence but they’re just not

as nuanced as humans.

They’re not as good at figuring out

whether a video is ISIS propaganda

or vital human rights documentation.

[PENSIVE MUSIC]

[PENSIVE MUSIC]