According to YouTube’s new community guidelines report, YouTube has gotten 110,000 appeals in the past three months regarding removed YouTube videos. However, they’ve only reinstated about 23,000 of them.

That means YouTube has reinstated less than a quarter of all the video with appeals. It is quite interesting that YouTube would actually share this data. This is the first time they have, likely trying to deliver on the company’s promise to be more transparent with their creator community. This data likely won’t land well with the creators on YouTube though. It’s very frustrating and in some cases devastating for creators to deal with YouTube’s appeal process. The fact that less than a quarter are reinstated is likely not going to go over well with creators.

Now, YouTube does have real reasons to some videos, like when they clearly violate YouTube’s policies. However, there are videos being removed that don’t necessarily violate their policies, primarily due to YouTube’s automated flagging system.

More data about YouTube videos

According to YouTube, between October 2019 and December 2019, the company removed more than 5 million videos. Out of all those videos, as the report says, there were 110,000 appeals resulting in 23,000 videos being reinstated. A vast majority of those videos were removed automatically, and more than 60 percent were removed before they received any videos.

Additionally, the report says a little more than 2 million channels were removed. Of those 2 million, 80 percent of these channels were considered spam. Also, of the videos removed, more than 50 percent were for spam or deceptive practices. Another 15 percent were removed for child safety, and 13 percent were removed for nudity or sexually explicit content. Hateful and abusive content made up 2.9 percent of all videos removed. Only 0.6 percent of videos were removed for cyberbullying and harassment.

“Our team is focused on accurately and consistently enforcing our policies, and one of the ways we hold ourselves accountable and measure our success is by making sure that users can easily appeal our decisions and monitoring the rate at which they do,” a YouTube spokesperson told The Verge.

Working towards transparency

As we said before, this is the first time YouTube has ever released this kind of information. At the very least, we can see a little more of what is going on inside YouTube headquarters regarding how they handle removed YouTube videos.

“This is just one more step towards providing transparency into the work we do to quickly and consistently enforce our policies,” the YouTube representative told The Verge. “We’re working to add more exhibits to this report over the course of 2020.”