YouTube removed more videos than ever last quarter

As predicted it was likely to happen, in the second quarter of 2020, YouTube removed more videos than ever before, as the company relied more on its algorithm rather than most of its human content moderators. That is according to the Community Guidelines Enforcement Report the company released Tuesday (through Protocol), showing that it deleted more than 11.4 million videos between April and June. In the same period last year, YouTube deleted just under 9 million videos.

“Considering the greatly reduced human assessment capacity as a result of COVID-19, we were forced to make a choice between possible negotiation or possible over-enforcement,” the company said. wrote in a blog post. “Because accountability is our top priority, we chose the latter: we use technology to help with some of the work normally done by reviewers.”

YouTube parent company Google told employees in March that it is extending its working from home policy until the end of 2020 due to the coronavirus. warned that the measures intended it would rely more on technology than human reviewers and that videos that would normally be fine on the platform could end up being accidentally deleted. The human moderators work from offices specially set up for reviews; if such work is done outside a controlled environment, there is a risk that user data – and sensitive videos – will be unintentionally displayed.

The company knew that removing more videos that didn’t violate the rules would also lead to more calls from content creators. So it added more staff to the appeals process to deal with requests as quickly as possible. Content removal requests increased from 166,000 in the first quarter of 2020 to over 325,000 in the second quarter. It also meant that YouTube turned itself around and recovered more videos in the second quarter: more than 160,000, compared to just over 41,000 in the first quarter (although YouTube noted in its blog post that some may have been appealed in an earlier quarter. of the relocations).

YouTube said in its blog post that for sensitive policies such as child safety and violent extremism, it saw more than three times more removals than normal in the second quarter, but it saw the temporary inconvenience for creators as worth the end result. “We accepted lower accuracy to make sure we removed as much violent content as possible.”