YouTube Community Guidelines implementation update for Q2 2022
Protecting YouTube’s community against harmful content is our top priority. YouTube’s Community Guidelines set the rules of the road for what we don’t allow on our platform such as pornography, incitement to violence, harassment and hate speech. To enforce these policies, we rely on a combination of human reviewers and technology to flag inappropriate content and act against it.
To provide transparency into our global enforcement efforts and how we handle violative content on our platform, we release a quarterly Community Guidelines Enforcement report. The report provides data on the flags YouTube receives and how we enforce our policies.
For the first time, and in order to provide transparency into how YouTube handles misinformation on its platform the Community Guidelines Enforcement report now includes the number of videos removed for violating YouTube’s misinformation policies whereas previously this number was included in the report under “Spam, Misleading and Scams”. For example, this encompasses medical misinformation removals. In Q2 2022, YouTube removed more than 122,000 videos globally for violating these policies.
The report also found that between April and June 2022, YouTube removed over 4.4 million videos for violating our Community Guidelines, overall. 93% of these videos were first flagged by our automated systems and more than 72% of the violative videos first detected by machines received fewer than 10 views before they were removed from YouTube. This means that our automated systems continue to help prevent the spread of violative content. The YouTube Community Guidelines Enforcement report also found that we removed over 1.3 million videos for child safety, over 900,000 videos for violent or graphic content and over 666,000 videos for nudity or sexual content.
This chart shows the volume of videos removed by YouTube, by the reason a video was removed. These removal reasons correspond to YouTube’s Community Guidelines. Reviewers evaluate flagged videos against all of our Community Guidelines and policies, regardless of the reason the video was originally flagged.
From the videos that were removed for violating our policies, three countries from the Middle East & North Africa were among the top 20 countries where violative content was uploaded according to IP addresses. Over 100,000 videos that were removed for violating our policies were uploaded from IP addresses in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt (36,000 in Iraq, 32,000 videos in Saudi Arabia, and more than 33,500 videos in Egypt). The number of removals is based on the country/region of upload and is based on the uploader’s IP address when the video was uploaded. The IP address usually corresponds with where an uploader is geolocated, unless they are using a virtual private network (VPN) or proxy server.
Globally, YouTube also terminated over 3.9 million channels in Q2 2022 for violating our Community Guidelines. The overwhelming majority of these channels were terminated for violating our spam policies. We also removed more than 754 million comments in Q2 2022, the majority of which were spam. Over 98.8% of removed comments were detected automatically.
Safeguarding our users is our utmost priority and we will continue to rigorously enforce our policies to protect our community.
