Video-sharing platform YouTube announced on Tuesday that it removed over 9 million videos that violated its community guidelines during the December quarter of 2023. This figure represents a notable increase from the previous quarter, where just over 8 million videos faced removal due to guideline breaches.
Among the countries with the highest number of removed videos, India claimed the lead with 2.25 million, followed closely by Singapore with 1.24 million videos taken down.
The platform also shared that more than 96% of the flagged videos were initially identified by automated systems rather than human intervention. Of the videos identified by machines, a significant portion — 53.46% — were removed before garnering a single view. Additionally, 27.07% of the flagged videos received between 1 and 10 views before being taken down.
YouTube said that the biggest reason for the removal of videos (39.2%) was because they were tagged as harmful or dangerous. The second top reason at 32.4% was child safety. Other reasons included violence, nudity, harassment or cyberbullying, hate speech, misinformation, etc.
Furthermore,
YouTube's efforts extended beyond video removals, with over 20 million channels terminated for violating community guidelines. This has almost doubled since the September 2023 quarter when 10.5 million channels were terminated. According to the company, the majority of these channels were axed due to violations of spam policies, including but not restricted to scams, misleading metadata or thumbnails, and video and comments spam.
The platform also targeted comment sections, eradicating more than 1.1 billion comments in the last quarter of 2023, primarily due to spam. YouTube said that over 99% of these comments were automatically detected and removed.
