The Content Getting Flagged On YouTube

YouTube has released its first three-monthly "enforcement report", which shows the number of videos it removed for breaching its community guidelines between October and December 2017. A combination of automated and human flagging allows YouTube to identify controversial content and in Q4 of last year, 8.28 million videos were deleted. While 76 percent of all removals through automated flagging occurred before anybody viewed the content, human flagging is also important and effective. YouTube relies on a huge community of human flaggers around the world and India, the U.S. and Brazil are the top-three nations by human flagging volume.

The following infographic shows the reason videos were flagged by that community. It is important to remember that a single video can be flagged multiple times or for several reasons. Sexual content had 9.1 million flags (30 percent of the total) while spam or misleading videos had 8 million (26.4 percent). Other reasons in the report include hateful/abusive, violent/repulsive or harmful/dangerous acts. Child abuse and the promotion of terrorism were also included with 1.6 million and half a million flags respectively. Flagging a video on YouTube does not immediately result in its removal. Once a trained reviewer confirms a violation of the website's guidelines, it is then taken down.