YouTube announces it removed more than 58 million videos last quarter

YouTube has released its latest transparency report on Thursday detailing the content its removed from the platform this past quarter. 

The released on Thursday mainly focuses on videos that were removed from the site due to violations of the company’s policies. In total, YouTube removed more than 58 million videos between July 1 and September 30 of this year for breaking community guidelines.

In a announcing the release of the latest report, YouTube boasts of its faster response in enforcing its policies from previous quarters. The company also announced some firsts for its latest transparency report.

“As part of this ongoing commitment to transparency, today we’re expanding the report to include additional data like channel removals, the number of comments removed, and the policy reason why a video or channel was removed,” said YouTube in its post.

Of those more than 58 million videos, 50.2 million videos were removed due to a channel-level suspension. YouTube removed more than 1.67 million channels in Q3. From the 7.8 million videos that were individually removed, 81 percent were first detected by machines, with 74.5 percent of those videos being removed before receiving a single view.

As for human beings reporting content, more than 10.4 million videos were flagged last quarter by users. India remains the top country where humans are flagging the most videos, followed by the United States and Brazil. YouTube’s report points out that not all flagged content is removed. 

The reason for content removal was broken down into nine categories. Over 72 percent of videos were removed for “spam, misleading and scams.” The rest of the removed content was due to child safety, nudity or sex, violent or graphic, harmful or dangerous, harassment or cyberbullying, promotion of violence and violent extremism, hateful or abusive, and other.

During the same time period, YouTube removed over 224 million comments in violation of Community Guidelines. YouTube automatically flagged 99.5 percent of those comments. This total does not include comments removed by Creators on their videos using moderation tools.

Despite these removals, YouTube reports that the ecosystem surrounding interact on the platform is growing. Regular YouTube viewers are 11 percent more likely to comment on content then they were last year.