It released Community Guidelines Enforcement report which shows that the U.S. is a distant second with 3,58,134 videos removed during the period
It released Community Guidelines Enforcement report which shows that the U.S. is a distant second with 3,58,134 videos removed during the period
Video sharing platform YouTube blocked over a million videos in India during the first three months of this year – more than any other country in the world, according to its Community Guidelines Enforcement report released on Tuesday.
As per the data shared, YouTube removed 1,175,859 videos in India for violating its Community Guidelines during January-March 2022 quarter. The U.S. was a distant second with 3,58,134 videos removed during the period under review, followed by Indonesia (2,22,471 videos), Brazil (2,11,580 videos), Russia (2,02,743 videos), Pakistan (1,24,457 videos), Bangladesh (93,784 videos), Mexico (77,139 videos), Vietnam (72,875 videos) and Thailand (71,805 videos).
YouTube has Community Guidelines that set the rules of the road for what is not allowed on the platform. The platform explained that it relies on a combination of people and technology to flag inappropriate content and enforce these guidelines.
“Flags can come from our automated flagging systems, from members of the Trusted Flagger program (NGOs and government agencies) or from users in the broader YouTube community. The Community Guidelines Enforcement report provides global data on the flags YouTube receives and how YouTube enforces policies, it added.
For India, the company also published their monthly transparency reports for the months of January, February and March 2022, in accordance with the Information Technology (Guidelines for Intermediaries and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021.
According to the India transparency report, the company received 33,995 complaints from users in January, following which 1,04,285 removal action was taken. Similarly, in February 93,067 removal actions were taken based on 30,065 user complaints and in March 93,457 removal actions were taken following 31,699 complaints.
These complaints are received from individual users located in India via designated mechanisms and relate to third-party content that is believed to violate local laws or personal rights on Google’s SSMI platforms. Each unique URL in a specific complaint is considered an individual “item”. A single complaint may specify multiple items that potentially relate to the same or different pieces of content. “When we receive complaints from individual users regarding allegedly unlawful or harmful content, we assess each item to determine if the content violates our Community Guidelines or content policies, or meets local legal requirements for removal,” it explained.
During the three-month period, the company also took about 11,43,138 actions as a result of automated detection processes to prevent the dissemination of harmful content such as child sexual abuse material and violent extremist content.
Globally, YouTube terminated over 4.4 million channels in Q1 2022 for violating its Community Guidelines. “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,” YouTube said.
It added that an overwhelming majority of these channels were terminated for violating the company’s spam policies. These include video spam – content that is excessively posted, repetitive, or untargeted and promises viewers they’ll see something but instead directs them off site, incentivisation Spam – content that sells engagement metrics such as views, likes, comments, or any other metric on YouTube, comments spam – comments where the sole purpose is to gather personal info from viewers or misleadingly drive viewers off YouTube.
“Between January and March of 2022, YouTube removed over 3.8 million videos for violating our Community Guidelines. 91% of these videos were first flagged by machines rather than humans. YouTube removed more than 943 million comments in Q1 2022, the majority of which were spam. 99.3% of removed comments were detected automatically,” it said.
