By Rachel Lerman, Technology Writer
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) --Matt Halprin, the global head of trust and safety for YouTube, has a tough job: He oversees the teams that decide what is allowed and what should be prohibited on YouTube.The Google-owned site has come under fire recently for allowing videos that feature what many find offensive or violent, and for not doing enough to protect kids online. Halprin has to make difficult decisions to craft policies that keep the site as safe as YouTube wants it to be, while balancing what the company considers one of its core tenets: people's free speech.
Halprin spoke recently about how his team works. Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Q: How does your team operate?
Halprin: They're separated into policy development and policy incubation. Policy development starts with the highest level of principles: We are an open platform. We do have a bias to allow freedom of expression on our platform and only remove content that we think is egregious and could cause real harm. We want to be a place where a variety of perspectives can be heard, and sometimes that even means things that people disagree with or are even offended by.
We kicked off a process a couple of years ago to essentially re-review all of our policies. We look at which policies seem to be most out of kilter with what our enforcement teams are telling us, the gray area cases or which policies are regulators talking about or the press asking about. As an example, in Q2 (June) we relaunched our hate speech policy.
Q: What does the process look like to make or change a policy?
Halprin: The team first does the research and puts together the framework and essentially a proposal. Once it gets through me, then we bring in our cross-functional partners and people on public policy and public relations, in product, in legal. We often get sent back to the drawing board on a few issues. Then we go to an executive steering review, which is chaired by our chief product officer. Finally, the fourth and final step is the top executives. We have these meetings every single week.
As we go through this process, these guys are watching a ton of video examples.
Q: How do you think about balancing free expression with safety?
Halprin: That is probably the toughest thing that we do. There is not a right answer. Not all of us agree. One person will think that, "Hey, we should have more civility. We shouldn't let something like this come up." And another person will say, "Yeah, but if you get rid of that uncivil comment, you lose some really valuable, you know, free expression or political discourse."
And so we have seriously huge debates about this. Sometimes we think that if we are not criticized by all sides for the policy, we've probably done something wrong. If you're only upsetting one side, then you probably haven't gotten it right.
Q: How do you ensure that things aren't slipping through the cracks when it comes to enforcement?
Halprin: We've always had community guidelines and that's what defines our rules. We measure how much exposure occurs on content that we think goes against the line. And that's going down. For every workflow, for every policy, I get a measure of how accurate our reviewers have been regularly.
“Heretic” and “Maria” Set As Red Carpet Premieres At AFI Fest
The American Film Institute (AFI) has announced that Heretic, the psychological thriller starring Hugh Grant, and Maria, based on the life of opera singer Maria Callas starring Angelina Jolie, will round out the Red Carpet Premieres section at this year’s AFI Fest. The Heretic Gala Screening will take place on Thursday, October 24, and the Maria Gala Screening will be held on Saturday, October 26. The complete Red Carpet Premieres section includes the world premieres of Music By John Williams, Robert Zemeckis’ Here, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl and Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2. All Red Carpet Premieres will take place at the historic TCL Chinese Theatre. The full lineup for AFI Fest 2024 will be unveiled on October 1.
“At the heart of AFI Fest is an unwavering dedication to celebrating the best in global cinema--together,” said Bob Gazzale, AFI president and CEO. “We look forward to uniting artists and audiences once again to be inspired by the art form in a powerful sense of community.”
Heretic follows two young missionaries (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) who are forced to prove their faith when they knock on the wrong door and are greeted by a diabolical Mr. Reed (portrayed by Grant), becoming ensnared in his deadly game of cat-and-mouse. The film is directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods and produced by Stacey Sher, Beck, Woods, Julia Glausi and Jeanette Volturno. The film will be released nationwide by A24 on November 8.
Directed by Pablo Larraín, Maria presents a tumultuous and beautiful depiction of one of the world’s most renowned artists and reimagines the legendary soprano in her final days in Paris, as Callas (Jolie)... Read More