India is YouTube’s biggest informer for inappropriate content

• India flagged 9.3 million unique videos on YouTube.
  
• 1.1 million YouTube videos were removed after being flagged by individual trusted flaggers.
  
• Most request pertained to sexual content, followed by spam and misleading videos.
  

Beating out all the countries around the world, India has topped the list of users flagging inappropriate content on YouTube. That isn’t surprising, considering that India has the second largest base of Internet users in the world, and China doesn’t have access to YouTube.

According to Google’s Transparency Report, as many as 9.3 million unique videos were flagged on the video streaming platform between the months of October to December in 2017, the majority of which came from India.

The report doesn’t indicate how many flags came from India specifically but it does show a break down of YouTube’s video removal statistics. Of the 9.3 million flagged videos, 8.23 million were taken down.

Between the different ways that videos can be removed on YouTube, nearly 6.7 million were withdrawn due to automated flagging. Apart from those, notifications by individual trusted flaggers were responsible for the removal of 1.1 million YouTube videos. User requests only accounted for 400,000 videos.

Most of the user requests pertained to the content being sexual, followed by being spam or misleading. Of the 8.28 million videos that were taken down, nearly 76 percent were addressed before they gained any views, though nearly a quarter had some exposure before being taken care of.

YouTubers like Logan Paul, Monalisa Perez and, Kanghua Ren have faced consequences for having posted inappropriate content. Ren was even charged with having convened a crime against moral integrity while Perez pled guilty to second-degree manslaughter. Over time, action against videos that don’t fall in line with YouTube’s policies has become more stringent.

This is the case with most social media platforms today. Even Twitter and Facebook are under fire for regulating their content and being aware of how news is being presented on their network.