The world largest video platform, YouTube has revealed in its first ever quarterly Community guidelines enforcement report how the company removed about 8.3 million videos that violated its term of service between October and December 2017.
According to the report, of the 8.3 million videos that were removed, 6.7 million were automatically flagged by its bot, while 75% of them were removed before they received a single view.
YouTube has made several mistakes in the past, mistakes which include blocking several alt-right channels, removing videos that in a good standing with its policies, monetizing channels promoting paedophilia and Nazis. At one point the video platform's search engine began to auto-suggest several disturbing queries.
The Q4 2017 report brings us relief as we now hope to see less or none of those hateful, sexually explicit or violent contents which are forbidden in YouTube's community guidelines.
Also in the report, YouTube said that they received some 9.3 million flags from humans in the last quarter of 2017, with viewers from India, US, Brazil, Russia and Germany leading the charge in reporting those clips.
30% of the flagged videos accounted for sexually explicit content (the most common), while videos containing spam or misleading contents accounted for 25.4% of all flags.
Though the company still has a lot more work to do in ensuring that the platform is kept clean, it also comes as a relief to hear that bots are doing much of the flagging and moderation thing. Back then, content moderation was carried out by staffs ... which actually required them to watch scores of flagged videos ... of which, most of these videos had horrific content capable of crushing staffs spirits.