During the fourth quarter of 2017, YouTube took down 8.3 million videos

Google owned streaming video site YouTube announced yesterday, that it will issue a report every quarter that details how it has helped clean up its inventory of videos. Monday, it released its initial report and said that for the last three months of 2017, more than 8 million videos were removed. Most of these were spam, or contained adult content. The streamer says that this technology is helping it quickly remove "high-risk low-volume" clips that can be characterized as containing "extremist views." It also helps discover high-volume problem videos that feature spam. To show how well this machine learning is working, 6.7 million of the 8 million videos removed last quarter were first "flagged" by machines rather than humans. 76% of the 6.7 million videos were removed by YouTube before they received even one view.

YouTube says that in response to criticism that it has been slow to remove videos that violate its guidelines, it is making great progress; last year only 8% of videos flagged and removed for containing violent extremism were removed with less than 10 views. In June of last year, the machine learning was introduced, and now 50% of videos removed for violent extremism have fewer than 10 views.


Earlier this year, YouTube announced the creation of an "Intelligence Desk," adding 10,000 new content moderators. But with all of those people looking for videos that shouldn't be on the site, sometimes mistakes are made. The company has just reinstated a video from watchdog group Media Matters that reveals how some of the outrageous claims made by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones are lies. The video focused on his since retracted claim that the Sandy Hook shooting was fake.

YouTube gave Media Matters a first strike and accused it of uploading a video that features "threats, harassment, bullying, or intimidation." YouTube realized its mistake after being asked about the video by The Guardian. After reinstating the video, YouTube said that removing it was a "wrong call." You can watch the clip by clicking on the video directly below.



source: YouTube, TheGuardian