Why Youtube took down 1 Lakh videos betwen April and June this year

Youtube has informed stakeholders, media and its users that due to the implementation of its hate speech policy it has removed 5 times more hateful videos, channels and twice the problematic comments. The time period for this was between April and June of this year however, the company attributed the spike to removals of older comments and videos in a blog post.

Roughly, a total of 1,00,000 videos propagating hate speech, 17,000 channels and 500 million comments have been removed during the time period for violating its hate speech policy it added.

Like other social media platforms, Youtube is also dealing with the problem of curbing fake news, racist slurs, anti-semitic content,etc. from propagating on its website. For this, it said that the company has instituted an ‘intelligence desk’.  This shall be a team that ‘monitors the news, social media and user reports in order to detect new trends surrounding inappropriate content, and works to make sure our teams are prepared to address them before they can become a larger issue’.

While this is going on, on the frontiers of the battle Youtube has put up its workforce as well as technology, to filter out content needing review. In fact, using and improving machine learning since 2017, the company said that 87% of the 9 million videos it removed in the second quarter of 2019 were already flagged by its automated systems.

The company is also working on reducing exposure to such hate speech beforehand. Through this, it has removed a number of videos even before they were published like those on child abuse and terrorist recruitment.  This it did, it said in its blog, using digital fingerprints.  Nearly 30,000 of the videos it removed last month generated just 3% of the views that knitting videos did over the same time period. 81.5% of its videos are deleted before any views come in.