Google and Campaign Against Antisemitism have agreed to collaborate on cleaning up Anti-Semitic hatred on YouTube, with Google granting the watchdog group access to special content flagging features.

Videos that the organization reports to Google will go through a fast-track reviewing process, following which Google may take the video off YouTube or place a number of limitations on it, such as removing it from video suggestions and making it harder to find. Once a video has been identified as promoting antisemitism, Google will use its algorithms to recognize the video if it is uploaded to YouTube again using a different user account.

CAA notes while they have not always agreed with Google about what should be on YouTube, this is a very promising collaboration which they hope will enable them to work with Google to reduce the amount of antisemitic material appearing on YouTube.

CAA is building a volunteer team to help flag videos which should be reported using the special reporting features provided to them by Google. If you would like to join the team, please go to antisemitism.uk/volunteer.

This announcement comes one week after social media giants Facebook, YouTube and Twitter faced another round of grilling by UK parliamentarians visibly frustrated at their continued failures to apply their own community guidelines and take down reported hate speech.

The UK government has this year pushed to raise online radicalization and extremist content as a priority — and has been pushing for takedown timeframes for extremist content to shrink radically.

The broader issue of online hate speech has continued to be a hot button political issue, especially in Europe — with Germany passing a social media hate speech law in October, and the European Union’s executive body pushing for social media firms to automate the flagging of illegal content to accelerate takedowns.

In May, the UK’s Home Affairs Committee also urged the government to consider a host of fines for social media content moderation failures — accusing tech giants of taking a “laissez-faire approach” to moderating hate speech content on their platforms.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)