YouTube said it took down 1,998,635 channels and 2,132,367,731 comments between April and June this year.
Google’s YouTube took down over 11.4 million videos between April and June, the company said in its Community Guidelines Enforcement report. The numbers are significantly higher than the videos – under 9 million – removed in the same period last year. The change has happened mainly because the company relied more on its algorithms instead of human moderators.
YouTube said it took down 1,998,635 channels and 2,132,367,731 comments during the said period.
According to the report, YouTube took down 10,849,643 videos through automatic flagging. About 382,499 videos were taken down through user reports. YouTube’s individual trusted flaggers helped taking down 167,318 videos.
“When reckoning with greatly reduced human review capacity due to COVID-19, we were forced to make a choice between potential under-enforcement or potential over-enforcement,” the company said in a blog post. “Because responsibility is our top priority, we chose the latter — using technology to help with some of the work normally done by reviewers.”
YouTube also shared a chart to show the volume of videos by the reason. Majority of videos, about 33.5%, were taken down over child safety issues. YouTube took down 28.3% videos flagged as spam and misleading.
Region-wise, YouTube took down 2,061,733 videos in the US, also the highest. India is at the second spot with 1,446,772 videos taken down. Brazil, Indonesia, and Russia featured in the top five list.
