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10,000 Google staff to police YouTube content

10,000 Google staff to police YouTube content

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YouTube, the world's second-most popular website, will be policed for content that is extremist or could endanger children

Google has said it will deploy, by 2018, a total of 10,000 people to hunt down content on YouTube that is extremist or could endanger children, media reports said.

YouTube CEOSusan Wojcicki admitted to Britain's Daily Telegraph that “bad actors are exploiting” the video-sharing site to “mislead, manipulate, harass or even harm”.

YouTube, which is owned by Google, is the world's second-most popular site.

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The reports said British Prime Minister Theresa May, after a spate of terror attacks in the UK, has put pressure on internet giants to root out extremist content online.

The reportsadded that YouTube pulled down 150,000 videos of children last week after viewers posted lewd comments about them.

The move came after media reports thatads for big brands were displayed alongside videos of children.

By themselves, they were innocent, but taken together they attracted viewer comments that seemed paedophilic in nature.

News reports said the situation made advertisers nervous, with some stopping YouTube advertising.

Wojcicki added that her company had developed "computer-learning" technology to identify videos that were extremist. And that the same technology could be used to identify content that endangers children.

"We will continue the growth of our teams, with the goal of bringing the total number of people across Google working to address content that might violate our policies to over 10,000 in 2018," she said.