YouTube removed over 8 MILLION offensive videos from the platform in just three months
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Every minute, around 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube - and now the site has revealed just how much of that content has to be removed.
YouTube has released a new quarterly report detailing how it tackles violative content on the platform.
The report, titled the YouTube Community Guidelines Enforcement Report, reveals that from October-December 2017, the platform removed over eight million videos.
The majority of these eight million videos were mostly spam or people attempting to upload adult content.
(Image: YouTube)
Interestingly, 6.7 million videos were first flagged for review by machines rather than humans - and 76 per cent of those were removed before they received a single view.
In a blog on the report, a spokesperson for YouTube said: “For example, at the beginning of 2017, 8 percent of the videos flagged and removed for violent extremism were taken down with fewer than 10 views.
“We introduced machine learning flagging in June 2017. Now more than half of the videos we remove for violent extremism have fewer than 10 views.”
(Image: YouTube)
While you might think that deploying machine learning would reduce the number of people reviewing content, YouTube says it’s actually the opposite.
The spokesperson added: “Our systems rely on human review to assess whether content violates our policies.”
In 2017, Google - which owns YouTube - committed to bringing the total number of people working to address violative content to 10,000 this year.
YouTube says it is on track to meet its contribution to that goal.