India tops YouTube's list of video takedowns for Q4 2024
What's the story
YouTube has revealed that it took down more than nine million videos for breaching its community guidelines between October and December of 2024.
India topped the list of countries with the most number of video removals, accounting for nearly three million deletions.
Brazil followed with 1.04 million removals, while the US retained its third-place position with 900,000 videos taken down.
Country statistics
Most of them were categorized as threat against child safety
Most of these removals, nearly 54%, were due to threats against child safety.
Next, harmful and dangerous content was the second most common reason for takedowns at 16%.
Other reasons included violence, nudity, harassment or cyberbullying, hate speech, misinformation etc.
YouTube also revealed that roughly 96.5% of these videos were flagged automatically without human intervention and nearly 55% were removed before they received any views.
Channel statistics
Decline in channel removals
Notably, YouTube saw a major decline in channel removals in the last quarter of 2024, with just 4.8 million channels being removed. This was a major decline from the last year's figure of 20 million in the same period.
The most takedowns in 2024 came in the January-March quarter, when 15.8 million channels were taken offline due to guideline violations.
Comment moderation
YouTube removes over 1.25 billion comments
In its continued effort to keep content standards in check, YouTube removed over 1.25 billion comments in Q4 2024, mostly for spam (81.7%).
The platform noted that 99.7% of these comments were detected and deleted automatically without human intervention.
To maintain its content standards, YouTube combines human review with advanced AI-powered moderation and flags for violations come from automated detection systems as well as reports from users across the platform.