India tops list for flagging inappropriate content on YouTube in 2017's final quarter: A closer look at report

India tops the list of countries whose users flagged the most videos on YouTube during the final quarter (October to December) of 2017 for inappropriate content, a transparency report released by Google revealed. The 93,21,943 unique videos flagged in those months included those flagged by YouTube users (94.9 percent), trusted flaggers (4.8 percent), non-governmental organisations and government agencies. Following India in the tally are US, Brazil, Russia, Germany, UK, Mexico, Turkey, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. Beyond these videos flagged by human users, YouTube’s automated flagging mechanism also helps the website remove inappropriate content. “Automated flagging enables us to act more quickly and accurately to enforce our policies,” Google said in the report. [caption id=“attachment_4445091” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] Graph showing percentage of automatically flagged videos removed before receiving any views. Image courtesy: Google[/caption]   Both flagging mechanisms (automated and human) led to the removal of over 8.28 million videos in the fourth quarter. [caption id=“attachment_4445125” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] The list of reasons users can choose from while reporting a video[/caption] “We rely on teams from around the world to review flagged videos and remove content that violates our terms, restrict videos (for instance, age-restrict content that may not be appropriate for all audiences), or leave the content live when it doesn’t violate our guidelines,” the report said. Of the 82,84,039 videos removed, 6.6 million were pulled down on the basis of automated flagging, the report said. When flagging a video, human flaggers can select from a list of reasons for reporting the video and leave comments or video timestamps for YouTube’s reviewers. Following are the reasons videos have been reported for by human users: — Sexual: 9.03 million (30.1 percent) — Spam or misleading content: 7.97 million (26.4 percent) — Hateful or abusive content: 4.72 million (15.6 percent) — Violent or repulsive content: 4.03 million (13.5 percent) — Harmful or dangerous acts: 2.3 million (7.6 percent) — Child abuse: 1.57 million (5.2 percent) — Promotes terrorism: 0.49 million (1.6 percent)

While the Google-owned company did not disclose details about the number of users from each country flagging content like pornography, incitement to violence, harassment, or hate speech, it ranked India at the top in terms of total volume. “Flagging a video does not necessarily result in it being removed. Human flagged videos are removed for violations of Community Guidelines once a trained reviewer confirms a policy violation,” the report said. The report also explained that a single video may be flagged multiple times and may be flagged for different reasons. “Reviewers evaluate flagged videos against all of our Community Guidelines and policies, regardless of why they were originally flagged.”