YouTube removed 1.9 m videos in Jan–Mar in India, highest among nations

Over 1.9 million videos were removed between January and March 2023 in India for violating YouTube's community guidelines, marking the highest removals among nations, according to a report released by the popular video streaming platform.

During the same period, globally YouTube removed over 6.48 million videos for violating community guidelines.

The 'Community Guidelines Enforcement' report provides global data on the flags YouTube receives and how YouTube enforces policies.

In that period, 654,968 videos from the US were removed, about 491,933 from Russia and 449,759 videos from Brazil were removed.

"Since the earliest days as a company, our community guidelines have protected the YouTube community from harmful content. We enforce our policies using a combination of machine learning and human reviewers," YouTube said.

Over the years, YouTube said, it has invested heavily in the policies and products needed to protect the community.

Today, the vast majority of creators upload content in good faith and don’t violate policies, it said, adding "we believe educational efforts are successful at reducing the number of creators who unintentionally violate our policies".

Citing the findings of the 'Community Guidelines Enforcement' report on the video removals, it said that more than 93 per cent of these videos were first flagged by machines rather than humans.

"Of the videos detected by machines, 38 per cent were removed before they received a single view and 31 per cent received between 1 and 10 views before removal," it said.

This means more than 69 per cent of the violative videos first detected by the software received fewer than 10 views before they were removed from YouTube.

YouTube also removed over 8.7 million channels in Q1 2023 for violating community guidelines.

"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," it said.

YouTube removed more than 853 million comments in Q1 2023 as well, the majority of which were spam. About 99 per cent of the removed comments were detected automatically.

YouTube said that starting 30 August, creators will have the option of taking an educational training course when they receive a Community Guidelines warning.

These resources will provide new ways for creators to understand how they can avoid uploading content that violates our policies in the future.