India leads tally of users flagging inappropriate content on YouTube

New Delhi: India continues to top the list of countries where YouTube users have flagged content for a suspected violation of community guidelines, ranking ahead of nations like the US, UK, Brazil and Russia.

During April-June 2019, about 10.88 million videos were flagged by users globally, as per the YouTube Community Guidelines enforcement report.

“In addition to our automated flagging systems, Trusted Flaggers and our broader community of users play an important role in flagging content. We receive flags for suspected violations of our Community Guidelines… Flagged content will remain live when it doesn’t violate our Community Guidelines,” it said.

India topped the list, followed by the US, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico and the UK. The countries were ranked by the total volume of flags received but the report did not disclose details of flags received from individual countries.

In the last edition too (January-March 2019), India was leading the tally.

Users flag content for a variety of reasons including spam, violence, hateful or abusive, or being sexually inappropriate.

In a blogpost on Wednesday, YouTube said it has removed over one lakh videos for hate speech alone, while more than 17,000 channels were terminated for the same reason.

Total comment removals nearly doubled in the second quarter to over 500 million, in part due to a large increase in hate speech removals, it added.

The company said improvements in its automated flagging systems have helped it detect and review content even before it’s flagged by the community, and consequently more than 80 per cent of those auto-flagged videos were removed before they received a single view in the second quarter of 2019.

“We’re determined to continue reducing exposure to videos that violate our policies. That’s why, across Google, we’ve tasked over 10,000 people with detecting, reviewing, and removing content that violates our guidelines,” the blogpost said.