Over 100,000 videos and more than 17,000 channels were removed by YouTube on its platform since June, approximately five times more than what it did during the previous quarter.YouTube revealed that it removed over 100,000 videos and more than 17,000 channels from its video-sharing platform for violation of its stricter hate speech policies, which were implemented earlier this year in June. This is approximately five times more than what it did during the previous quarter.
The Google-owned company claimed that its stricter policies on hate speech have started showing a profound impact. The comment removals have also doubled during the same period to over 500 million, YouTube said in a blog.
The rise in the removal numbers related to hate speech is in part due to the removal of older comments, videos and channels that were permitted earlier. The video-sharing platform had in June updated its policies on hate speech, in which it said that it would remove those videos which depict supremacist content.
During the April-June quarter, YouTube has removed over nine million (9,015,566) videos and more than four million (4,069,349) channels. Around two-thirds of the videos removed were under the category of spam, misleading and scams, while 90.3 per cent of the removed channels were under that category, according to the data given by the company.
Out of this total figure, 1.2 per cent of the videos removed and 0.4 per cent of the channels removed fell under the category of hateful or abusive. Over 80 per cent of the auto-flagged videos were removed before they received a single view in the second quarter of 2019, YouTube said.
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YouTube said that it is determined to continue reducing the exposure to videos which violate its policies. The company has designated over 10,000 people with detecting, reviewing, and removing content that violates their guidelines.
