Google has disclosed that YouTube removed about 11 million videos during the second quarter compared to six million videos at the beginning of the year.
The tech giant said it had updated its automatic systems to be stricter because they were short-staffed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This means that the system could also have taken down some videos in error.
The company also said that it had put in place stricter automatic measures in factors to do with “violent extremism” and “child safety”, which of course led to increased video take-downs.
As a result, child safety was the top reason for video removal followed by spam.
In normal times, harmful content is normally reviewed by human personnel. However, with fewer workers available, that was not possible.
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“One option was to dial back our technology and limit our enforcement to only what could be handled with our diminished review capacity,” the company said in a blog post.
It said that the other option was “to cast a wider net so that the most content that could potentially harm the community would be quickly removed”. YouTube opted for this resulting in the take-down of more videos, some of which were not in violation of their policies.
The number of appeals from video creators also increased from 165,941 to 325,439 for the period. This was however not unexpected as YouTube had warned video creators in March about increased video removals.
Normally, YouTube reinstates just about 25 per cent of the videos appealed for content creators after a human review. However, they have increased the reinstated videos to 50 per cent following the erroneous takedowns and huge number of appeals.
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YouTube’s automated system performs almost all the initial take-downs. Between April and June, the system flagged 10,849,634 videos compared to 382,499 which were flagged by human users.
The rest are reported to have come from “trusted flaggers” such as NGOs and Government agencies. YouTube users flagged more than 15.5 million during the quarter, but the company only took down a small percentage of these.
YouTube also took down about two million channels in the same period, with the majority believed to be spamming or scamming users.
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