YouTube removes 9 million videos for violating its rules, India sees the most removals

YouTube has removed nearly 9.5 million videos between October and December 2024. Notably, India had the highest number of removals, with almost 3 million videos taken down.

YouTube has strict rules and doesn’t allow hate speech, violence, harassment, or fake information to thrive. The platform uses AI technology and human reviewers to find and delete harmful content. Most of the time, YouTube’s system catches bad videos before they get too many views.

The biggest reason behind the takedowns was Child safety violations. More than 5 million videos were removed for putting kids at risk. Other reasons included dangerous content, harassment, and violent scenes. Spam and misleading content were also high on the list.

And it’s not just videos. YouTube removed 4.8 million channels too, mostly for spam and scams. When a channel is deleted, all its videos disappear as well. In total, over 54 million videos vanished this way!
Even the comment section wasn’t safe. YouTube deleted a jaw-dropping 1.2 billion comments, mostly for spam, but also for harassment and threats.