YouTube heeft in 2015 92 miljoen video’s verwijderd. Dit omdat ze niet zouden voldaan aan de richtlijnen, meldt Google op de betreffende blog. Dat gebeurde dankzij een mix van gemelde video’s en Google’s eigen anti-spamtechnologie.

Gemelde video’s

1 procent van de gemelde video’s bevatte terreur en/of haat. Sinds 2006 hebben meer dan 90 miljoen gebruikers zelf een video gemarkeerd via het vlaggetje op YouTube. Een derde van de mensen heeft meer dan eens een video gemarkeerd. Google roept gebruikers op om dat te blijven doen. Het aantal markeringen groeit per jaar met 25 procent, stelt YouTube.

Kritiek

Er is ook kritiek op de verwijdering van de video’s omdat Google video’s van de vrij toegankelijke versie van YouTube bewust zou willen verplaatsen naar de betaalde versie (in de VS), genaamd YouTube Red:

Today ESPN had to remove most of its videos from all versions of YouTube in the US. Because its other contracts prevent it from being on subscription services like Red, ESPN’s videos are now disappearing from the ad-supported tier of YouTube in the US.]

Google says the goal is to offer consistency, so people thinking about subscribing to Red don’t have to worry about their favorite content not being available in the ad-free service. But there’s no explanation why it couldn’t just flag videos of those who don’t sign the deal as “Not On Red”, and instead had to go with a sign-or-disappear strategy.

Flagging

Het aangeven van een ‘foute’ video – in strijd met de richtlijnen van YouTube – zou al door 90 miljoen gebruikers zijn aangegeven:

YouTube allows people anywhere to share their stories with the world. They share their sense of humor, their talents, their opinions, what’s happening around them and within them. YouTube is also a community, and over the years, people have used the flagging feature located beneath every video and comment to help report content they believe violates our Community Guidelines.

We want to empower you, the YouTube community, to better understand how flagging works and how you can get involved in maintaining our community guidelines. To shed some light on how your flagging activity has helped keep YouTube a platform where openness and creative expression are balanced with responsibility, here are some of the latest data:

• Over 90 million people have flagged videos on YouTube since 2006 – that’s more than the population of Egypt – and over a third of these people have flagged more than one video.

• As YouTube grows, the community continues to be very active in flagging content: the number of flags per day is up over 25 percent year-on-year.

• Community flagging on YouTube is international: People from 196 countries have flagged a video. The five countries with the most accurate flagging rates are: Indonesia, Turkey, Germany, Ukraine and France.

• We’re also continuing to strengthen our policy enforcement processes: In 2015 alone, we removed 92 million videos for violation of our policiesthrough a mix of user flagging and our spam-detection technology. While we are vigilant and fast in removing terrorist content and hate speech, it’s worth noting that it actually represents a very small proportion of the content that violates our guidelines – those two violations account for only 1 percent of the videos removed in 2015.