Recently YouTube removed more videos in the second quarter of 2020 than it ever had in history. The company has reportedly leaned more on its algorithm.
The news was shared in the Community Guideline Enforcement report by the company released on Tuesday. According to the report, YouTube took down 11.4 million videos between April and June. In the same period last year, YouTube removes just under 9 million videos.
The company wrote in a blog post: “when recording with greatly reduced human review capacity due to COVID-19- we were forced to make a choice between potential under-enforcement or potential over–enforcement. Because responsibility is our top priority, which chose the latter – using technology to help with some of the work normally done by reviewers.”
Google, the parent company of YouTube, told its employees in March that it was extending its work-from-home policy until the end of 2020 due to coronavirus. The company warned that the measures meant it would rely more on technology than on human reviews, and content that would generally be fine on the platform might end up being removed in error.
YouTube understands that deleting more videos that didn’t violate its rules would lead to more appeals from the content creator. In response to that, YouTube added more staff members in its appeal process department so that requests would be handled as quickly as possible.
The number of appeals for taking down content went from 166,000 in the first quarter to more than 325,000 in second. In the blog post, the internet giant said that for sensitive policy areas such as child safety and violent extremism. It saw more than triple the number of removals during the second quarter, but it viewed the temporary inconvenience for creators as worth the result.
“We accepted a lower level of accuracy to make sure that we were removing as many pieces of violative content as possible.”
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