With the reception of almost 110,000 appeals from creators who have found their videos taken down, YouTube had received all these appeals in the span of three months, yet the company has reinstated less than quarter of the appeals, according to The Verge.
YouTube’s new community guidelines shows the public this data as it also makes the first time YouTube is sharing information regarding appeals, according to The Verge. However, YouTube creators are dealing with their videos constantly being taken down by YouTube and finding themselves having to go through the company’s appeal process. Creators have asked YouTube for it to be more transparent especially with the appeal process, and at last YouTube will be sharing its data for the first time with the public, according to The Verge.
Between the months of October and December of 2019, YouTube said that it had removed more than 5 million videos. Of the 5 million videos, only 109K were appealed and YouTube had only reinstated around 23K according to The Verge. However, most of those videos were removed automatically – computer-authorized removal, not human – and more than 60% of those 5M videos were removed before the video had collected any views. In addition to 5 million videos, YouTube does mention the fact that 2 million channels were also removed due to the fact that more than 80% of those channels were considered spam, according to The Verge.
“Our team is focused on accurately and consistently enforcing our policies, and one of the ways we hold ourselves accountable and measure our success is by making sure that users can easily appeal our decisions and monitoring the rate at which they do,” a YouTube spokesperson told The Verge.
Of the 5 million videos that were removed off of YouTube, almost more than 50% of them were for spam or deceptive practices, 15% were because of child safety, and 13% were removed because of nudity or explicit content, according to The Verge. Of all videos removed, 2.9% of them consisted of hateful and abusive content, 0.6% (33K videos) were removed due to cyberbullying and harassment.
“This is just one more step towards providing transparency into the work we do to quickly and consistently enforce our policies,” the YouTube representative said to The Verge. “We’re working to add more exhibits to this report over the course of 2020.”
The hateful and abusive content is an area where YouTube has been responsible to answer for over the last few years, for YouTube has updated its policy in order to prohibit creator-on-creator harassment. So all in all, YouTube is only trying to follow its policy without a fault, hence the lack of reinstating videos on the platform.
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