Limited Hours for YouTube Moderators

YouTube is limiting its moderators time in watching disturbing videos. The online video giant is placing a limit on the time its human moderators spend in watching disturbing videos every day.

The said company has relied on human moderators to review its videos for inappropriate or offensive materials. But the Google-owned video service is also aware of the psychological effect. Viewing a high volume of disturbing content will have on its human moderators.

That is why the video service YouTube is starting to limit the viewing time of its human moderators to four hours per day of watching those videos. This is based on the announcement Wojcicki made in an interview with Wired at South by Southwest in Austin.

An article in The New Yorker looked at the growing number of human moderators employed at tech companies. Social Media sites are employing people to scan online posts, pictures, and videos with the potential to offend and disturb.

“This is a real issue and I myself spent a lot of time looking at this content over the past year. It is really hard.”, Wojcicki said in an interview.

Aside from limiting the time spent on watching disturbing videos, the company will also provide them with what they call “wellness benefits”.

They promised to hire 10,000 moderators in order to ensure that the videos are scanned. Scanned from what? For potentially offensive content by a person, not just by algorithm.

This proved to be a rough year for YouTube. But this move saw advertisers flock away from the service. They received complaints about ads which contain anything. From terrorists or violent extremist content to disturbing content exploiting children.

Blame and criticism were directed to the company’s moderators. Conspiracy theory even came up. YouTube is taking action against conspiracy theorists who use the site to spread false and misleading information.