'Crisis actors' YouTube video removed after it tops 'trending' videos

Jefferson Graham | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Maryland students head to Capitol in call for gun control Hundreds of Maryland high school students are ditching class and rallying at the U.S. Capitol in support of stronger gun control. (Feb. 21)

LOS ANGELES — YouTube apologized Wednesday for suggesting viewers watch a video that attacked student survivors of the Florida shooting.

The video, since deleted, had gone straight to the top of the YouTube "Trending" tab, a popular spot for users to check out the most popular videos.

"This video should never have appeared in Trending," YouTube said in a statement.

The video, first noticed by tech website Motherboard, was taken down three hours after the publication's post. It had over 200,000 views, and referred to student David Hogg as an actor, someone who has been "bought and paid by CNN and George Soros," according to Motherboard.

The video featured clips from an older interview Hogg gave to Los Angeles TV station KCBS. "Because the video contained footage from an authoritative news source, our system misclassified it," said YouTube. "As soon as we became aware of the video, we removed it from Trending and from YouTube for violating our policies. We are working to improve our systems moving forward."

YouTube has come under attack for being an easy place to post conspiracy theory videos that mislead the public and can compound the pain for victims of violent attacks.

After a gunman murdered over 50 concertgoers at the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas in 2017, several conspiracy videos were posted to YouTube, some questioning whether the shooting had actually occurred and others claiming law enforcement officials had deceived the public about what really happened.

In response, YouTube said it changed its algorithm to help weed out these types of videos.

At the time, YouTube said it would promote videos from more mainstream news outlets in search results after people looking for details on the Las Vegas shooting were served up conspiracy theories and misinformation.

A search for "crisis actors," on YouTube Wednesday found several videos were still widely available that suggested the high school shooting that killed 17 in Parkland, Fla. last week were not as reported and the students protesting were shams, part of a coordinated effort to get harsher gun restrictions enacted.

Former student Nikolas Cruz, 19, admitted last week he was behind the killings inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, which have stirred a wave of protests by high school students demanding more action against gun violence. Contributors to websites like Infowars and Gateway Pundit have suggested some of the more outspoken students were not real students, but rather actors set up by liberal-leaning political organizations pushing an anti-gun agenda.

Hogg, 17, denied the accusation Tuesday, telling CNN, "I'm someone who had to witness this and live through this, and I continue to be having to do that."

More: Florida lawmaker's aide fired after falsely claiming Parkland students are crisis 'actors'

YouTube said in a statement that those other videos would remain up, unless viewers flagged them to YouTube.

"Last year we updated the application of our harassment policy to include hoax videos that target the victims of these tragedies. Any video flagged to us that violates this policy is reviewed and then removed. We’re committed to making more improvements throughout 2018 to make these tools faster, better and more useful to users."

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced in late 2017 that YouTube would begin to hire more humans to oversee online videos, to weed out the ones that shouldn't be there.

However, YouTube said humans don't curate videos that appear in the Trending list, because the tabs are different all over the world. "Humans do help train our algorithms, along with many other systems are used to suggest potential videos," YouTube said.