YouTube Knew Hundreds Of Videos With Ads For Setup Fraud. The video platform removed 1,400 videos with built-in advertisements for EduBirdie, a Ukrainian service that allows students to commit fraud.
That writes BBC News, which discovered that more than 250 YouTube channels contain videos with that type of advertising.
YouTube gave some of the channels until 4 May to get the ads out of their videos, but they did not all respond to that. The ads were mounted in the videos so that YouTube had no view of it. Usually, YouTube has control over external ads.
The advertisements of EduBirdie encourage students to hire a “super smart nerd”. They would then write an essay for the student. According to BBC News, there were more than 1,400 videos were watched over 700 million times.
It is not forbidden to assemble advertisements yourself in videos. “Users on YouTube may offer paid advertising as part of their videos if they do not violate our rules,” YouTube stated in a statement. “Complaints about writing essays are removed when we discover them.”
Deleted videos
It happens more often than YouTube removes videos from its platform. In the last three months of 2017, more than eight million films erased worldwide.
Those videos did not comply with the rules of the site and content in particular spam and porn. YouTube has published these figures for the first time but wants to do this more often in the future.
For detecting and removing ads, the service uses artificial intelligence. That software ensured that three-quarters of the videos removed before anyone could see them.