YouTube placed a banner showing information about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States on livestream videos showing the Notre Dame cathedral burning.
The 850-year-old structure in Paris burning drew thousands of people across the world to live streams from major networks, including CBS, NBC, and Fox News.
A number of the live streams included a banner titled "September 11 attacks" on YouTube, which included one-and-a-half sentences—three lines of text across the bottom of the screen—about the 9/11 terror attacks before guiding people to a link to the Encyclopedia Britannica website.
The banner was noted by a number of journalists, including independent journalist Nick Monroe, who specializes in threads on Twitter.
The boxes were announced last year, with Google CEO Susan Wojcicki saying videos that were about "conspiracies" would include clarifying information from Wikipedia.
A YouTube spokesperson admitted on Monday that the 9/11 banner was showing on various livestreams and said the algorithm problem was fixed.
Google fixed the issue in less than an hour.
Reactions
A number of people reacted to the issue on Twitter."Sounds like image recognition being confused by the twin bell towers being on fire," said one user.
"It's probably just because 9/11 has been on the news and those are two buildings on fire. Algorithms being stupid as always But holy [expletive] does it look bad," added another.
"Why in the world is @YouTube putting information about 9/11 underneath the Notre Dame livestream from @FRANCE24?" added another.
"Clicks, baby, clicks. Nothing else matters," said another.
"When you get an algorithm to make decisions .....this is what you get," said another.