Erasing History: YouTube’s Deletion Of Syria War Videos Concerns Human Rights Groups

YouTube hosts 4 million videos related to Syria that have been uploaded since the outbreak of the war in 2011, according to Keith Hiatt, vice president of the human rights program at Benetech, a technology nonprofit. But YouTube wasn’t designed to be the world’s largest repository of war footage. Over the summer of 2017, YouTube introduced a machine-learning-based algorithm to flag videos for terms of service (ToS)-related violations. The algorithm’s purpose was to expedite the removal of propaganda videos that extremist groups like ISIS had posted—but it flagged a large volume of activist content for removal, too. Within a few days, some 900 Syria-related channels disappeared off the platform.