YouTube develops strategy to counter terrorism

Initially, YouTube shared its new strategy to identify and filter out the terrorism content from its site. Now, the video-sharing giant has found a technique for countering terrorism.

According to its new strategy, YouTube plans on redirecting people searching for terrorist content to anti-terrorist content. Through this, people can have their thoughts stabilized and will prevent them from becoming a probable recruit for various terrorist organizations like ISIS.

YouTube said in its blog post that they hope to “provide more resources and more content that can help change minds of people at risk of being radicalized”.

Naming this feature as ‘Redirect Method’, the feature is a collaboration of YouTube’s parent company Alphabet’s Jigsaw tech incubator and the anti-extremist data firm Moonshot CVE (Countering Violent Extremism).

According to Fortune, the method works in a way that when a person searches for particular keywords on the site, a targeting tool flags the search and instead prompts a playlist of videos ‘debunking violent extremist recruiting narratives’.

In the blog post, YouTube stated, “When people search for certain keywords on YouTube, we will display a playlist of videos debunking violent extremist recruiting narratives.”

YouTube decided to put forth this strategy when numerous ads advertisers removed their ads from YouTube because they were being exposed with such videos that preach extremist principles, reported Tech Juice.

The company said, “Terrorism is an attack on open societies, and addressing the threat posed by violence and hate is a critical challenge for us all. Google and YouTube are committed to being part of the solution. We are working with government, law enforcement and civil society groups to tackle the problem of violent extremism online. There should be no place for terrorist content on our services.”

The company is even preparing to develop this feature further in order to “wider set of search queries in other languages beyond English”.

Other social media websites like Facebook and Twitter are also doing their part to restrain terrorist content and ideology that is spreading from their respective forums.

“As we develop this model of the Redirect Method on YouTube, we’ll measure success by how much this content is engaged. Stay tuned for more,” YouTube mentioned.