Growing our Trusted Flagger program into YouTube Heroes

YouTube has always allowed people to report content they believe violates our Community Guidelines and we often hear questions about what happens to a video after you've flagged it. When a flag is received, the reported content is always reviewed by YouTube before being removed. We have internal teams from around the world who carefully evaluate reports 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and these teams remove content that violates our policies or are careful to leave content up if it hasn't crossed the line.

Back in 2012, we noticed that certain people were particularly active in reporting Community Guidelines violations with an extraordinarily high rate of accuracy. From this insight, the Trusted Flagger program was born to provide more robust tools for people or organizations who are particularly interested in and effective at notifying us of content that violates our Community Guidelines.

As part of this program, Trusted Flaggers receive access to a tool that allows for reporting multiple videos at the same time. Once content is flagged, our trained teams review them to determine whether to remove the flagged videos or not. Our Trusted Flaggers' results around flagging content that violates our Community Guidelines speak for themselves: their reports are accurate over 90% of the time. This is three times more accurate than the average flagger.

Given the success of the Trusted Flagger program, we want to do more to empower the people who contribute to YouTube in other ways. That's why we're introducing YouTube Heroes, a program designed to recognize and support the global community of people who consistently help make YouTube a better experience for everyone. These “Heroes” do this in big and small ways by adding captions & subtitles to videos, reporting videos that violate our community guidelines, or sharing their knowledge with others in our help forums.

The program is now available to a select group of contributors from across the globe who have histories of high quality community contributions. People who are interested in joining the program can express interest here and we will gradually admit other top contributors into the program. 

YouTube Heroes will have access to a dedicated YouTube Heroes community site that is separate from the main YouTube site, where participants can learn from one another. Through the program, participants will be able to earn points and unlock rewards to help them reach the next level. For example, Level 2 Heroes get access to training through exclusive workshops and Hero hangouts, while Level 3 Heroes who have demonstrated their proficiency will be able to flag multiple videos at a time (something Trusted Flaggers can already do) and help moderate content strictly within the YouTube Heroes Community site.

A sneak peek at the new YouTube Heroes Community site

YouTube Heroes will also be able to track their own contributions and see their overall impact. They can easily find out when a video they reported has been removed by YouTube for violation of our policies, a subtitle they contributed has been approved by the creator, or a help forum answer they've posted has been marked as best answer.

A look at how YouTube Heroes can track their contributions

To kick the program off, we brought our first class of YouTube Heroes together for the first time this week at a two-day summit at YouTube HQ.

Meet our first class of YouTube Heroes!

It's early days for the program and we will continue to roll out the details of YouTube Heroes and the dedicated YouTube Heroes Community site over the coming months. We're excited to learn through this initial launch and to continue improving the program over time, as we've done with our Trusted Flagger program. We appreciate everything our community does to make YouTube vibrant and diverse, so on behalf of the team: thank you!

Jen Carter, Product Manager, YouTube Heroes, recently watched “#voteIRL - Use Your Voice. Vote in Real Life.”