YouTube removed 8.3 million videos in just three months

YouTube has revealed that it removed around 8.3 million videos from the site between October and December last year, in a bid to quell criticisms of offensive content.

The figures, published in YouTube’s first ever quarterly “enforcement report”, do not include videos removed for breaching copyright or other legal reasons, the BBC reports. 

A total of 9.3 million videos were flagged by users for potentially violating YouTube’s community guidelines over the three-month period, says Alphr,  but only 400,000 of these clips were eventually removed.  

Sexually explicit videos attracted the most complaints, and the site’s users in India, the US and Brazil were the most active in reporting issues.

Meanwhile, the Google-owned company’s artificial intelligence (AI) systems flagged 6.7 million videos for deletion. Of those videos, 76% were removed before they had been seen by YouTube viewers. 

A further 1.1 million were identified by YouTube’s designated community of human flaggers.

The video-sharing platform said in a blogpost that it would continue to release reports on the volume of videos removed for violating its guidelines. 

“By the end of the year, we plan to refine our reporting systems and add additional data, including data on comments, speed of removal, and policy removal reasons,” the company said. 

According to The Guardian, YouTube is one of several internet-based companies facing pressure from “national governments” to remove videos containing extremist or abusive content. 

The company has also been criticised over the content that it does allow, the newspaper says. YouTube faced a backlash following the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida in February, after videos were posted accusing the survivors of being actors who staged the atrocity in order to build “fake opposition to guns”.