YouTube admits ‘wrong call’ over deletion of Syrian war crime videos

YouTube has apologized after “mistakenly” removing videos portraying war crimes and other facets of the Syrian civil war by activists and opposition groups.

Last week, a number of organisations – including Middle East Eye, open source investigations site Bellingcat, and monitoring group Airwars – said that a number of their videos had been removed by YouTube for violating the platform’s “community guidelines.”

Furthermore, some media outlets found their entire YouTube accounts suspended, including Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins and Syrian opposition media channel Orient News.

The removals began days after Google, which owns YouTube, trumpeted the arrival of an artificial intelligence program that it said could spot and flag “extremist” videos without human involvement.

But since then vast tracts of footage, including evidence used in the Chelsea Manning court case and videos documenting the destruction of ancient artifacts by Islamic State, have been flagged as “extremist” and deleted from its archives.

However, in a statement released on Wednesday, YouTube conceded it had made the “wrong call” on a number of videos, and said they had been reinstated.

“We recently announced technological improvements to the tools our reviewers use in video takedowns and continue to improve these,” they said, according to the Times.

“With the massive volume of videos on our site, sometimes we make the wrong call. When it’s brought to our attention that a video or channel has been removed mistakenly, we act quickly to reinstate it.”

YouTube told MEE in an email last week that the video “Drone footage by Islamic State shows suicide car attacks on Iraqi forces inside Mosul” was removed and that YouTube had “assigned a community guidelines strike, or temporary penalty” to MEE’s account.

P/C PIXABAY