Globally, in the first quarter of 2022, YouTube terminated over 4.4 million channels in Q1, 2022 for violating its community guidelines, as per the community guidelines enforcement report launched by YouTube. The majority of these channels were terminated for violating its spam policies. As per the company, YouTube doesn’t allow spam, or other deceptive practices that take advantage of the YouTube community including video spam, incentivisation spam and comments spam.
Between January and March of 2022, YouTube removed over 3.8 million videos for violating its community guidelines. 91% of these videos were first flagged by machines rather than humans.
Interestingly, YouTube removed more than 943 million comments in Q1, 2022, the majority of which were spam. More than 99.3% of removed comments were detected automatically.
In Q1 2022, over 2,20,000 video removals on YouTube were appealed, and the company reinstated over 32,000 of those. In India, 1,175,859 videos were removed for violating YouTube’s community guidelines.
To be noted, video spam includes content that is excessively posted, repetitive, or untargeted and does one or more of the following – promises viewers they’ll see something but instead directs them off site; gets clicks, views, or traffic off YouTube by promising viewers that they’ll make money fast; sends audiences to sites that spread harmful software, try to gather personal info or other sites that have a negative impact. Incentivisation spam includes content that sells engagement metrics such as views, likes, comments, or any other metric on YouTube. This type of spam can also includes content where the only purpose is to boost subscribers, views, or other metrics. Meanwhile, comments spam includes comments where the sole purpose is to gather personal info from viewers, misleadingly drive viewers off YouTube, or perform any of the prohibited behaviors noted above.
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