YouTube says monitoring content regularly to check fake news amid polls

YouTube is continuously monitoring the content on its platform to check misinformative and violative posts as there has been a rise in "interest" due to the election season, an official of the Google's service said. The online video service from this month has started providing information panel in India around certain events, topics, publishers alongside search and videos to make users aware of context and videos they watch, he highlighted.

When asked about the trend of fake news or misinformative content that YouTube is seeing on its platform particularly after the announcement of general elections, YouTube News Partnerships Director Tim Katz said, "Right now, certainly, there is a rise in interest because of the election but we continue to monitor and take down content."

"We are constantly trying to have a balancing act between freedom of expression, keeping that content up and again going back to our product principle of allowing our users to make decision on their own. We want to provide enough context and information for them to decide," Katz told reporters here.

He mentioned that misinformation in general is a broad problem across the world.

"However, when something does violate our guidelines or policies or things that are harmful, hoaxes etc we take that content off from our content entirely.

"As we think about misinformation there are lot of types of misinformation. Certain content that might just be inaccurate, it is there we provide additional context. In case of violative content we will remove it entirely," Katz explained.

 Google has committed USD 25 million to filter fake news on its platform. Under this commitment, Google and its subsidiaries are building partnerships with third parties to cross check information being uploaded on its platform.

In India, YouTube has partnered with 10 entities to do fact check of information uploaded on its platform.

Katz said 500 hours of content being uploaded every minute on YouTube and hence the company is deeply using artificial intelligence and machine learning to pull down many content even before they get first view.

"In each case we look at local law and see if actually applies on that instance before we take any action on removing that content." Katz said.

When asked about monitoring of deep fake video specially when election season is on, Katz said that it has not emerged as major issue yet and is mostly being used for entertainment purposes.