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.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
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”.
-
Can Gaza momentum help end the war in Ukraine?Today's Big Question Zelenskyy’s request for long-range Tomahawk missiles hints at ‘warming relations’ between Ukraine and US
-
The Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners being releasedThe Explainer Triumphant Donald Trump addresses the Israeli parliament as families on both sides of the Gaza war reunite with their loved ones
-
A magical underwater world at Conrad Maldives Rangali IslandThe Week Recommends Watch the colourful marine life while you dine or from the comfort of your bed at this seriously swanky resort
-
Is the UK government getting too close to Big Tech?Today’s Big Question US-UK tech pact, supported by Nvidia and OpenAI, is part of Silicon Valley drive to ‘lock in’ American AI with US allies
-
Google: A monopoly past its prime?Feature Google’s antitrust case ends with a slap on the wrist as courts struggle to keep up with the tech industry’s rapid changes
-
South Korea's divide over allowing Google MapsTalking Points The country is one of few modern democracies where the app doesn't work
-
Google avoids the worst in antitrust rulingSpeed Read A federal judge rejected the government's request to break up Google
-
Is AI killing the internet?Talking Point AI-powered browsers and search engines are threatening the death of the open web
-
Unreal: A quantum leap in AI videoFeature Google's new Veo 3 is making it harder to distinguish between real videos and AI-generated ones
-
Google's new AI Mode feature hints at the next era of searchIn the Spotlight The search giant is going all in on AI, much to the chagrin of the rest of the web
-
Is Apple breaking up with Google?Today's Big Question Google is the default search engine in the Safari browser. The emergence of artificial intelligence could change that.
