YouTube removes 2.25 mn videos in India for violations

YouTube has taken down 2.25 million user-generated videos in India from October to December 2023 due to breaches of its community guidelines, placing India at the top of the list for such actions. Globally, the company removed 9 million videos during the same timeframe.

According to YouTube’s Community Guidelines Enforcement Report, the majority of these videos (96%) were flagged by automated systems rather than by human users, government entities, or organizations. More than half of the removed videos (53.46%) were eliminated before they even received a single view, with another 27.07% garnering between one and ten views. The prevalence of videos flagged by automated systems has notably increased compared to those identified by other means.

YouTube's community guidelines cover various areas such as spam, deceptive practices, sensitive content, violence or danger, regulated goods, misinformation, as well as educational, documentary, scientific, and artistic content.

The company terminated 20 million channels, twice the number removed in the previous quarter, primarily for violations of its spam policies, including scams, misleading metadata or thumbnails, as well as video and comment spam.

Alphabet Inc-owned YouTube clarified that when a channel is terminated, all its associated videos are removed. Between October and December 2023, approximately 95.53 million videos were taken down due to channel-level termination, with spam or misleading content accounting for the majority (92.8%) of reasons for channel removal, followed by nudity or sexual content (4.5%).

"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 behaviour), or is determined to be wholly dedicated to violating our guidelines (as is often the case with spam accounts). When a channel is terminated, all of its videos are removed," said YouTube in the blog post.

Following India, Singapore (124,387) and the United States (788,354) had the second and third-highest number of videos removed, respectively. Additionally, YouTube eliminated more than 1.1 billion comments during the period, predominantly spam, with over 99% of such comments being automatically detected.