India leads global list of YouTube takedowns as removals surge 32% in three months | Technology News
India had the highest number of YouTube videos taken down globally over the last three months of 2024. Out of a global total of 9.4 million videos, over 2.9 million YouTube videos were removed by the Google-owned company between October and December last year, for violating its Community Guidelines.
Brazil came in second place with over 1,043,412 YouTube video removals, according to the Community Guidelines Enforcement (Q4 2024) report published by the tech giant on Friday, 7 March.
Since 2020, India has consistently topped the list of YouTube’s takedown list. The data shows a 32 per cent increase in YouTube video removals in India compared to last quarter (2,214,068 video removals in Q3 2024).
The platform’s takedown disclosure comes on the heels of a controversy that erupted over “obscene” remarks made by podcaster Ranveer Allahabadia on an online comedy show called India’s Got Latent hosted by stand-up comedian Samay Raina.
The episode in question was taken down by YouTube in compliance with a legal order issued by the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. The “obscene remarks” row has also prompted the central government to examine the need to create a new legal framework for regulating YouTube and other social media platforms.
It must be noted that YouTube’s global transparency report released on Friday does not include content removals or restrictions based on local laws.
Over 96% violating content detected by AI
YouTube said that more than 96 per cent of the 9.4 million policy-violating videos were first flagged by its automated content moderation tools. Only 330,595 violating pieces of content were flagged by humans.
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The majority (around 58 per cent) of policy-violating content globally was flagged for violating YouTube’s child safety policies, while 16 per cent was removed for being harmful and dangerous.
Other reasons for removal of YouTube videos include violent or graphic content (8.9 per cent), harassment and cyberbullying (7.6 per cent), and nudity or sexual content (5.4 per cent). The violative videos received eight to nine views out of every 10,000 views, before they were flagged and taken down by the platform, as per the report.
In addition, the company disclosed that over 4.8 million YouTube channels were blocked between October and December 2024. “The overwhelming majority of these channels were terminated for violating our spam policies, including but not restricted to scams, misleading metadata or thumbnails, video and comments spam,” YouTube said.
More than 1.25 billion comments were removed by YouTube after being marked as spam by its automated content moderation systems.
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