In its bid to purge hate speech and extremist content, Google LLC-owned YouTube may have gone overboard and banned channels that didn’t exactly violate the company’s terms of service, according to reports.

In 2017, YouTube made moves to clean up the platform after numerous complaints. One thing it said it would do is to hire about 10,000 human moderators to keep closer tabs on content than automated filters can.

This it did, but it seems some of the moderators were perhaps too trigger-happy, and following the Parkland, Florida, school shooting, the mods took down channels and clips from pro-gun channels and right-wing channels.

These channels may have not breached YouTube’s terms of service, though one could say some promoted outlandish conspiracy theories. Nonetheless, YouTube admitted the banning was a mistake.

“As we work to hire rapidly and ramp up our policy enforcement teams throughout 2018, newer members may misapply some of our policies resulting in mistaken removals,” a YouTube spokeswoman told Bloomberg. “We’re continuing to enforce our existing policies regarding harmful and dangerous content, they have not changed. We’ll reinstate any videos that were removed in error.”

Google is under pressure and in a difficult situation, given that one side is asking for the company to take a harder line on videos promoting gun use. There’s also some argument over whether a conspiracy theorist posting a clip about a supposed “crisis actor” in a school shooting deserves a suspension.

The conspiracy theorists would be quick to say that blocking this kind of content amounts to a Big Brother-type of information control. That’s exactly what InfoWars’ Alex Jones said, claiming the left-wing technocracy is moving against the right. Perhaps YouTube’s stringent moderation doesn’t help assuage their paranoia, and blocking these voices only gives them more support and to some extent credence.

Outline published a number of accounts that were banned during the purge, and indeed many of were of the conspiracy theory ilk. Outline wrote of popular banned channels that promote the idea that “the Trump Administration has been communicating secretly with a chosen few ‘patriots’ through 4Chan and 8Chan in an attempt to warn them about a pedophilic, cannibalistic Deep State cabal.”

Perhaps it’s harmless fantasy, but such news is believed — read the comments – and certainly more by a generation that have grown up on YouTube and may lack critical and analytical faculties.

Image: Rego Korosi via Flickr