December 2023. Beginning with the July-September 2023 reporting period, we began to provide more ranges for data on videos removed, by views. In previous reporting periods, this data was limited to 0 views, 1-10 views, or >10 views before removal. We now provide more granular counts: 0 views, 1-10 views, 11-100 views, 101-1,000 views, 1,001-10,000 views, and 10,000+ views.
September 2023. Beginning with the April-June 2023 reporting period, we began to break out data for channels removed under our policies related to “Misinformation", including our medical misinformation policies, certain types of technically manipulated content, and content interfering with democratic processes. (Note: These are just examples; other content may now or in future be classified under this category.) In previous reporting periods, these types of removals were nested under the "Spam, misleading and scams" category. We also now nest the previous “Impersonation” category for channel removals under the category “Misinformation”.
June 2023. YouTube’s Trusted Flagger program has been renamed the YouTube Priority Flagger (YTPF) program. There are no fundamental changes to how this program operates and how organizations flag content.
March 2023. Due to a bug in our Community Guidelines reporting system, some live chat comment removals were undercounted. This has been corrected starting with October 2022 data.
November 2022. The Individual Trusted Flagger program was discontinued in May 2022. Our newly introduced category “Organization” includes non-governmental organizations who are members of the Trusted Flagger program.
September 2022. Beginning with the April–June 2022 reporting period, we began to break out data for videos removed under our policies related to “Misinformation", including our medical misinformation policies, certain types of technically manipulated content, and content interfering with democratic processes. (Note: These are just examples; other content may now or in future be classified under this category.) In previous reporting periods, these types of removals were nested under the "Spam, misleading and scams" category.
June 2020:
- We have updated the appeals total to ensure we are counting only user appeals of video removals, not other actions (e.g., age-restriction). We have also updated the Q4 2019 appeals reinstatement data to account for removals that were incorrectly reported as reinstated, but may have had redundant enforcement actions applied to them. We’ve adjusted our systems and the data accordingly.
- The chart that displayed the count of removed videos that were first flagged through automated flagging, with and without views, has now been replaced with a chart that displays the count of all videos removed, regardless of how they were first flagged, and is grouped by view count. All historical data is available in the table below:
| Reporting period | Removed Before Any Views | Removed After Any Views |
|---|---|---|
| Oct 2019 - Dec 2019 | 64.7% | 35.3% |
| Jul 2019 - Sep 2019 | 67.8% | 32.2% |
| Apr 2019 - Jun 2019 | 80.5% | 19.5% |
| Jan 2019 - Mar 2019 | 75.7% | 24.3% |
| Oct 2018 - Dec 2018 | 73.0% | 27.0% |
| Jul 2018 - Sep 2018 | 74.5% | 25.5% |
| Apr 2018 - Jun 2018 | 75.4% | 24.6% |
| Jan 2018 - Mar 2018 | 72.9% | 27.1% |
| Oct 2017 - Dec 2017 | 74.8% | 25.2% |
November 2019. Beginning with the April–June 2019 reporting period, we began excluding a small percentage of video removals that had an assigned removal reason of “other” because we determined these were legal removals—e.g., copyright or action taken in accordance with local law—rather than policy removals. Legal removals are outside the scope of this report and are instead captured in a Google-wide Transparency Report, “Government requests to remove content.” We corrected the April–June video removals data accordingly.
August 2019. A portion of comment removals in Q1 2019 were incorrectly recorded in our Community Guidelines Reporting system, and so were not reflected in the comment removal numbers. Accordingly, we revised the total number of comments removed and the number and percentage of comment removals by source of first detection.
| Reporting period | Total comments removed (ORIGINAL) |
Comments removed, by source of first detection |
|---|---|---|
| Jan 2019 - Mar 2019 | 228,338,026 | Automated flagging: 99.3% (226,724,106) Human flagging: 0.7% (1,613,920) |
May 2019. Beginning with the January-March 2019 reporting period, we reclassified some Trusted Flaggers to count them as part of the individual Trusted Flagger group instead of the NGO group, to more accurately reflect their status.
May 2019. We discovered that a portion of actions taken to remove spammy comment engagement (likes and dislikes) during the Q3 and Q4 2018 reporting periods was inadvertently counted toward the total comment removal numbers. Accordingly, we revised the total number of comments removed and the number and percentage of comment removals by source of first detection.
| Reporting period | Total comments removed (ORIGINAL) |
Comments removed, by source of first detection |
|---|---|---|
| Jul 2018 - Sep 2018 | 224,440,949 | Automated flagging: 99.5% (223,374,780) Human flagging: 0.5% (1,066,169) |
| Oct 2018 - Dec 2018 | 261,645,574 | Automated flagging: 99.5% (260,337,802) Human flagging: 0.5% (1,307,772) |
December 2018. We do not include information about copyright flags and removals in this report but discovered that a portion of automated copyright removals had been inadvertently counted toward the total video removal numbers. Accordingly, we revised the total number of videos removed as well as the number and percentage of video removals first detected by automated flagging.
| Reporting period | Total videos removed (ORIGINAL) |
Videos removed, by source of first detection: Automated flagging (ORIGINAL) |
Percentage of removed videos first flagged through automated flagging, with and without views (ORIGINAL) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 2017 - Dec 2017 | 8,284,039 | 6,685,731 | 75.9% without views 24.1% with views |
| Jan 2018 - Mar 2018 | 9,790,082 | 7,061,368 | 74.1% without views 25.9% with view |
| Apr 2018 - Jun 2018 | 7,791,068 | 6,824,535 | 76.6% without views 23.4% with views |