India accounted for over 25% of videos removed from YouTube in Q3

India accounted for the largest number of videos removed from video sharing platform YouTube over the past year. According to the company’s enforcement report, India topped the list of countries in terms of number of videos removed for 11 straight quarters. It overtook the United States on the list back in the April-June 2020 edition of this report.

YouTube published quarterly enforcement reports for its platforms, which detail how its community guidelines are being enforced. Videos are removed for violating policies around the spread of misinformation, hate speech, violent or graphic content, child safety and more.

In the July-September 2022 period, YouTube removed over 1.7 million videos in India, accounting for over a fourth of the 5.6 million videos removed worldwide. The company had also removed 1.3 million and 1.1 million videos in India, respectively, in the previous two quarters. Indonesia, the US, Brazil and Russia rounded up the top five in the July-September period.

Further, the company claimed that over 94% of the 5.6 million videos removed were first flagged by machines instead of humans. Of these, 36% were removed before they received a single view, while another 31% got between one and 10 videos before their removal. The company also removed over 5 million YouTube channels and 728 million comments worldwide over the third quarter of the year.

Interestingly, the company received less than a 100 government requests for taking down content in India. This is much lower than the 55,497 data requests received by social media platform Meta in the January-June 2022 period, up from 45,275 requests in the preceding six-month period.