EU Reporter: Verifying #BigTech promises
We are exhausted by spectacular failures to protect user’s privacy, allowing advertisers to illegally target housing and job ads based on race and age, promoting fake news designed to incite violence and disrupt elections, and allowing terror-groups to continue to radicalize and recruit online. We are exhausted by the apologies and the promises to do better. Policymakers and advertisers have been increasingly vocal in their frustration of social media companies’ lack of aggressively addressing everything from radicalizing, terror-related material to sexually explicit content targeted at children. In response, YouTube just last week announced that they had removed over 8 million videos in the previous three months, the majority of which were spam or adult content. On the surface, these numbers sound promising, but a closer look paints a different picture. Over a seven-week period between March 8 and April 26 of this year, we used our own technology to identify the presence on YouTube’s platform of just 256 previously identified ISIS-generated terror-related videos. Here is what we learned: No less than 942 ISIS videos were uploaded to YouTube. These 942 videos garnered a total of 134,644 views.
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