YouTube has made a series of changes to its algorithms after advertisers were pulling themselves out of YouTube due to their ads appearing next to extremists' videos.
Besides implementing Jigsaw's Redirect Method, YouTube also upgraded its machine learning that uses AI to automatically flags up suspicious content.
This helped YouTube in policing its more than 400 hours of contents that are uploaded to its platform every minute. Revealing earlier this month that 75 percent of violent extremist videos were removed by the machine learning, helping YouTube to double its take-down rate.
YouTube's algorithm flags up videos which may breach the site's guidelines, but it also removes them automatically before a human reviewer decides whether or not they should be deleted.
As a result, it has deleted thousands of videos highlighting violence in Syria. Other clips which were removed included footage of air strikes on jihadist facilities originally posted by the U.S. military. Several channels dedicated to exposing atrocities in the country were also deleted.
This error was solely YouTube's mistake.
One human rights expert who advises the International Criminal Court warned that the removals would make it difficult for the UN to monitor the war and bring criminals to justice. It raised concerns that YouTube could be deleting evidence in future war crimes trials.
In a statement, YouTube said that:
"We recently announced technological improvements to the tools our reviewers use in video takedowns and we are continuing to improve these."
"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."
While tech companies have promised to remove content advocating for extremism online from groups such as ISIS, YouTube has admitted that it made a mistake in this case.