YouTube Took Down 8.3 Million Videos In Q4 2017 For Inappropriate Content

After getting bombarded with criticisms over videos that showcase inappropriate content for children on the streaming service’s Kids platform, as well as other objectionable clips, YouTube decided that it was finally going to take action. The Google subsidiary announced that it removed about 8.3 million videos during the fourth quarter of last year, many of which were flagged before they gained tractions.

YouTube made the information public via blog post, wherein it detailed the reasoning behind the removal of millions of videos and what the nature of these videos was. It’s also worth pointing out that a lot of the heavy lifting was done by machines, which are apparently getting better at identifying inappropriate content.

“We removed over 8 million videos from YouTube during these months. The majority of these 8 million videos were mostly spam or people attempting to upload adult content - and represent a fraction of a percent of YouTube’s total views during this time period,” the post reads. “6.7 million were first flagged for review by machines rather than humans. Of those 6.7 million videos, 76 percent were removed before they received a single view.”

As Engadget notes, YouTube has been under fire since last year after it was discovered that contents masquerading as videos for children actually contained extremely inappropriate images and topics. The mass removal of videos is just one of the steps that the platform has started taking in order to prevent such incidents from happening again.

While machines are doing a lot of the work in this regard, YouTube has also decided to hire about 10,000 people to actually review the videos that are being uploaded on a daily basis. This is intended to help mitigate the problem of mistaken flagging so that clips that do fall within community guidelines are allowed to stay up.