Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai has stated in interview that he wishes the company had addressed the YouTube problem sooner.
The “problem” that Pichai was referring too, was of course the controversial content, supremacist and other content that shouldn’t be on YouTube. Pichai stated that some of this content has been on the platform for years and should have been removed long ago, but Google didn’t address it until it became a big deal – aka, now.
In talking with CNBC, Pichai also noted that there will never be enough humans to filter through and remove all of the controversial content on the platform.
Stating that “we’ve gotten much better at using a combination of machines and humans. So it’s one of those things, let’s say we’re getting it right 99-percent of the time, you’ll still be able to find examples. Our goal is to take that to a very, very small percentage well below one-percent.”
Pichai also referenced credit card systems. In saying that “anything when you run at that scale, you have to think about percentages.”
The CEO is correct, but that doesn’t mean that nothing shouldn’t be done, and Pichai agrees. Google, which is YouTube’s parent company, has been putting a lot of effort behind cleaning up the platform and fixing these issues. But Pichai still wishes that Google had addressed these issues much sooner.
YouTube has gotten pretty big, and it’s making the task a lot harder for Google to complete. Sure, Google could hire a bunch of humans to watch every video that is uploaded to the platform. But given the fact that there are 300 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute of the day. Making it impossible to do that. This is why Google does rely pretty heavily on machine learning and artificial intelligence to find out what should be on YouTube and what needs to be taken down. But as is the case with anything, it’s not perfect.
It’s obviously good to see that Google is working on YouTube to get this controversial content off of the platform and keep it off of the platform, but it might be a case of “too little, too late” for YouTube. The platform has always been an open one, allowing users to post pretty much anything they wanted – anything that was illegal. But it is now getting a lot of attention by liberals for conservatives going after them. Alex Jones and Steven Crowder are two main examples there. Those two were posting pretty hateful videos, aimed at specific people. While Alex Jones was likely a bigger deal than Steven Crowder, it still proves the point that something should have been done much sooner.
Pichai isn’t covering up for YouTube, and spreading falsehoods, saying that everything is good over there. Which is a good thing for Pichai, and it’s also good that he is directing resources to YouTube to fix the many issues that YouTube has. Hopefully it does get fixed and YouTube becomes a happier place to waste time while you’re at work.