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YouTube tries harder, removes 8.3 million videos in 3 months
June 24, 2025
It looks like the constant criticismYouTubereceives relating to the amount of inappropriate content on the platform has finally gotten through to the company. In its first quarterly moderation report,YouTube statedthat it removed 8.3 million videos during the last three months of 2017.
The bulk of the videos removed were spam or adult content, and 6.7 million of those videos – or roughly 81 percent of the total – were first flagged by machines rather than humans. And, of the 6.7 million videos flagged by robots, 76 percent were removed before anyone watched them even once.
The information comes fromYouTube’s blog, which going forward will release a quarterly report on its content moderation. According to YouTube, “this regular update will help show the progress we’re making in removing violative content from our platform. By the end of the year, we plan to refine our reporting systems and add additional data, including data on comments, speed of removal, and policy removal reasons.”
YouTube also wants to get you involved in the moderation. It is rolling out aReporting History dashboardto all YouTube users that they can access to see the status of any content they’ve flagged. Hopefully, users seeing the progress of their flags will encourage them to keep flagging content that violates YouTube’s terms.
The most important category of videos that need to be removed from the platform is those involving violent extremism. To emphasize how important it is to YouTube that these videos don’t ever get popular on the platform, the company provided this chart which shows how more and more violent videos are taken down before they even get to 10 views:
YouTube’s problems with moderation came to a head last year when disturbing contentpromoted towards childrenstarted to appear on both YouTube and theYouTube Kidsapp. The videos depicted kid-friendly characters like Peppa Pig, Disney princesses, andMarvel superheroesacting out violent and sexually suggestive themes.
This quarterly moderation report is a direct response to those issues, and will hopefully give people (especially parents) a better idea of what YouTube is doing to combat the abuse of its platform.
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