The eSafety Commissioner is clarifying two items mentioned in a recent ABC Insiders On Background podcast.
Firstly, the Commissioner stated that Google was not using hash-matching technology to scan for child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) material on its YouTube service. Google does scan for previously identified CSEA videos on YouTube. As eSafety’s latest transparency report notes, Google does not use hash-matching technology to scan for previously identified CSEA videos on other services including Google Messages, Google Chat, or Gmail.
The Commissioner also noted recent changes to YouTube’s content moderation policies outlined in the New York Times article YouTube loosens rule guiding the moderation of videos.
The article explains in more detail about this change, including that YouTube raised the amount of permitted offending content to half a video, up from a quarter "for videos considered to be in the public interest".
In subsequent communications with eSafety, Google has clarified that this subset of videos represents a small percentage of total content on YouTube.