YouTube deletes millions of videos, channels, comments for violating its policies

YouTube continuously keeps on filtering content posted on it that violates its policies. Once again, they recently filtered out their content and removed around millions of videos, channels and comments from the platform, with the help of machine learning.

YouTube recently published its last quarter report that detailed the number of content it took down that violated its privacy policies. Between July and September, the social media platform removed 7.8 million videos, about 1.7 million channels and more than 224 million comments.

The company informed how machine learning has played a major role in helping YouTube take down the content. It said, “We’ve always used a mix of human reviewers and technology to address violative content on our platform, and in 2017 we started applying more advanced machine learning technology to flag content for review by our teams.

“This combination of smart detection technology and highly-trained human reviewers has enabled us to consistently enforce our policies with increasing speed.”

Of the 7.8 million videos removed, 81% were detected through the company’s automated systems, and around 74.5% of them didn’t even receive a single view before being detected. Around three-quarters of the videos were spam, while 10% videos violated child safety and adult content rules. 0.4% of the removed videos included content promoting violence or violent extremism.

As of for the 1.7 million removed channels, about 80% were promoting spam, 12% hosted adult content and 4.5% accounted for violating child safety rules. The 224 million comments included those that violated YouTube’s community guidelines and those labeled as ‘likely spam’ and weren’t approved by the channel’s creators. YouTube’s smart detection technology detected 99.5% of the removed comments.

“We are committed to making sure that YouTube remains a vibrant community, where creativity flourishes, independent creators make their living, and people connect worldwide over shared passions and interests.

“That means we will be unwavering in our fight against bad actors on our platform and our efforts to remove egregious content before it is viewed. We know there is more work to do and we are continuing to invest in people and technology to remove violative content quickly,” wrote YouTube.