By Valentina Perez
According to Atlas VPN investigation, Google’s video platform YouTube removed 1.98 million channels between January and March of 2020. In 87.5% of the cases, the channels were terminated due to promoting scams, sending out spam, or posting misleading content.
The report shows that:
- YouTube removed 1,975,135 channels mainly for promoting scams, sending out spam, or posting misleading content in 2020 Q1.
- Google’s streaming platform removed nearly 158 thousand or around 8% of channels for nudity or sexual content. Another 51 thousand or 2.6% of channels were terminated for violating YouTube’s child safety rules.
- Due to channel-level suspension, more than 51 million videos were removed.
- YouTube terminated 693,579,605 comments during Q1 of 2020. Over 67.9% of deleted comments were spam or scams.
- YouTube informs that over 90 million users have flagged videos on YouTube since 2006. The number of reports per day is up 25% year-by-year.
The full report provides detailed data on the violations for which YouTube deleted channels, videos, and comments. The paper also shows how much content is flagged by YouTube’s algorithm and how much is flagged by humans.
According to Atlas VPN investigation, Google’s video platform YouTube removed 1.98 million channels between January and March of 2020. In 87.5% of the cases, the channels were terminated due to promoting scams, sending out spam, or posting misleading content.
YouTube deletes a channel when it violates its community guidelines three times within 90 days. Also, a channel can be terminated because of a single severe case, such as predatory behavior.
When YouTube deletes a channel, all of its videos are removed as well. Together with 1.98 million channels, due to channel-level suspension, more than 51 million videos were removed in the first quarter of 2020, as reported in the recently released YouTube Community Guidelines enforcement report.
Rachel Welch, COO of Atlas VPN, shares her thoughts on YouTube’s report:
“By looking at the numbers of removed channels, videos, and comments, it seems that Google will not give up on its battle against inappropriate content anytime soon.”
Nearly 694 million comments removed
YouTube’s report also highlights that a staggering 693.58 million comments were removed in Q1 of 2020. Out of 693.58 million comments, Youtube’s algorithm flagged 99.6% of cases automatically, indicating that the algorithm is doing most of the heavy lifting.
In contrast, humans flagged 2.5 million or 0.4% of comments. As a side-note, these numbers do not include comments removed by channel owners on their videos.
Just like with channels, most comments – 470 million or 67.9% were deleted because they promoted scams, misleading content, or violated spam guidelines.
The leading streaming platform terminated another 96.6 million comments or 13.9% because of child safety violations. In addition, over 81.5 million or 11.8% of remarks were removed due to harassment and cyberbullying.
Lastly, YouTube removed more than 43.5 million or 6.3% of opinions because they were hateful or abusive.
