YouTube removes 2.25 mn videos in India over rules, most for any country

96% of videos removed worldwide between Oct and Dec were first flagged by machines, says company

YouTube said on Tuesday it removed 2.25 million user-generated videos in India between October and December 2023 for violating its community guidelines, making the country the top in a list for such action.

Globally, the company removed 9 million videos in the same period. As many as 96 per cent of the videos were first flagged by machines rather than humans, according to YouTube’s Community Guidelines Enforcement Report.

As many as 53.46 per cent of the videos were removed before they received a single view and 27.07 per cent got between one and 10 views. The volume of videos flagged by machines has surged compared to those marked out by users, government agencies and organisations.

YouTube’s community guidelines include segments like spam and deceptive practices, sensitive content, violent or dangerous content, regulated goods, misinformation and educational, documentary, and scientific and artistic content.

The Alphabet Inc-owned company terminated 20 million channels, double the number removed in the previous quarter. “The overwhelming majority of these channels were terminated for violating our spam policies, including but not restricted to scams, misleading metadata or thumbnails, video and comments spam,” said the company in a blog post. Alphabet also owns search engine Google and other subsidiaries.

When a channel is terminated, all its videos are removed. As many as 95.53 million videos were removed between October and December 2023 due to channel-level termination. The top reason for channel removal is spam or being misleading (92.8 per cent share) followed by nudity or sexual content at 4.5 per cent.

“A YouTube channel is terminated if it accrues three Community Guidelines strikes in 90 days, has a single case of severe abuse (such as predatory behavior), or is determined to be wholly dedicated to violating our guidelines (as is often the case with spam accounts),” said the report.

Singapore (124,387) and the United States (788,354) had the second and third-highest number of videos removed after India.

YouTube removed more than 1.1 billion comments – mostly spam – in the period. Over 99 per cent of such comments were detected automatically.