YouTube to warn users before posting comments that may be offensive

YouTube will begin warning users before posting comments that may be offensive to other people, the company said Thursday.

The new feature is part of the video-sharing platform’s efforts to tackle widespread racist and homophobic harassment targeting creators by commentators and other accounts.

YouTube will also begin to proactively ask users to provide demographic information in an effort to find patterns of hate speech “that may affect some communities more than others.”

The company last December tightened its policy on harassment, saying it would take a tougher stance on “veiled or implied threats” in the future.

The company claims that since the start of 2019, it has increased the number of daily hate speech comment renewals 46-fold.

However, hateful content remains rampant on the platform.

The strategy of warning users that their comments may be offensive has been tested by other platforms.

Instagram began giving users pop-ups asking if they were sure they wanted to post comments that might violate the app’s guidelines in July 2019. It expanded those “push warnings” in October.

Instagram said initial trials of the pop-up yielded positive results.

A study by OpenWeb and Google’s AI conversation platform published in September attempted to quantify the effects of comment comments by analyzing 400,000 comments on news websites.

The study found that for about a third of commenters seeing a disclaimer caused them to revise their comments. Just over half of those who edited their comments edited them in a way that no longer violated community standards, while about a quarter simply reworked their comments to avoid triggering the automated system.

Thirty-six percent of users exposed to the warnings posted the comment anyway.

These results appear to match previous research by Coral, a commenting platform owned by Vox Media and used by many media sites.

This 2018 study found that over a six-week period, 36% of those who received comments on one of McClatchy’s websites changed their comment to reduce toxicity.