YouTube removes about one video per second for violating its community standards

In Google’s latest transparency report, it reveals a stunning detail that illustrates the extent of violence, sex, and other inappropriate content posted on YouTube. In the fourth quarter of 2017, about 8,284,039 videos in total were removed after being flagged by human moderators and technology for violating its ban on pornography, incitement to violence, harassment, or hate speech—that’s more than one video per second!

The vast majority of those videos (over 6.6 million) were flagged by its algorithm, slightly over 1.1 million by its human moderators, just 402,335 by individual viewers, and only 7 by government agencies. About three-fourths of the inappropriate videos were removed before ever being viewed on the platform— which means that over 1.6 million videos containing inappropriate content were viewed by users at least once before being removed.

Of the inappropriate content, about 30% of it is flagged for being sexual, 26.4% for being spam or misleading, 15.6% for being hateful or abusive, 13.5% for being violent or repulsive, among other smaller categories. And of the countries from which YouTube receives the most human flags, India is at the top, followed by the United States, Brazil, and Russia.