Google spends hundreds of millions of dollars on content review: letter

Silhouettes of laptop and mobile device users are seen next to a screen projection of Google logo

in this picture illustration taken March 28, 2018.

WASHINGTON – Alphabet Inc’s Google unit told a U.S. House panel it spends hundreds of millions of dollars annually on content review and said it manually reviewed more than 1 million suspected “terrorist videos” on YouTube in the first three months of 2019.

Google disclosed in a April 24 letter made public on Thursday that the manual review found 90,000 videos violated its terrorism policy.

In March, following the live-streaming on social media of a mass shooting in New Zealand, the chair of the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security urged the top executives of Google, Facebook Inc, Twitter Inc and Microsoft Corp do a better job of removing violent political content.

After a briefing in March, Representative Max Rose, who chairs a subcommittee on intelligence and counter-terrorism, asked the four companies in an April 10 letter to disclose their budgets for counter-terrorism programs and number of people working solely on counter-terrorism programs.

Rose said in a statement Facebook has not responded and the other firms did not fully or directly answer his questions.

Twitter said in an April 24 to Rose that “putting a dollar amount on our broader efforts is a complex request.”