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YouTube has announced that it is experimenting with a feature that will let users add context to videos in the form of notes. This will help provide relevant information to others for clarification. This arrives in addition to other context prioritising features that YouTube has introduced recently such as information panels and additional requirements for disclosing synthetic or altered content.
A similar feature was introduced by the Elon Musk-led X platform in which the users can add community notes to a post, providing additional information about the post.
YouTube is making the pilot accessible on mobile to users in the US in English. Google’s streaming platform has accepted that there will be mistakes and that it will learn from them. Users are also invited to give feedback so that YouTube can improve and decide if the feature needs to be expanded.
Initially, selected users will be contacted via email or Creator Studio notification to start writing notes to test the feature. It would be necessary to have an active YouTube channel that follows the community guidelines of the platform to be eligible to be invited to use notes.
In the upcoming days, notes will be visible to the users in the US and during this time third party evaluators will rate if the notes are helpful and this information will be used to train the systems. YouTube has said that these will be the same evaluators who review their search results and recommendations. Eventually, the creators will also be allowed to rate the notes.
Notes will be visible publicly in a small box under a video if they are found helpful. Users will be asked if the notes are “helpful”, “somewhat helpful” or “unhelpful” and why. After the feedback, YouTube will employ a bridging based algorithm to analyse the ratings and decide which notes will be published. If a note is rated helpful by many users who previously rated the notes differently, YouTube will display that note.
