YouTube is now removing over 100,000 videos per quarter for “hate speech”

YouTube has released fresh stats that show the impact of its controversial new “hate speech” rules which were rolled out in June. When these rules were introduced, history channels, independent journalists, and other channels producing innocuous types of content were either demonetized or terminated but the scale of the removals related to these rules wasn’t reported by YouTube.

With the release of these new stats, YouTube has shown that these new “hate speech” rules led to over 100,000 videos and 17,000 channels being removed in Q2 2019 - a 5x increase compared to the previous quarter. The stats also show that YouTube removed a staggering 500 million comments in Q2 2019 which represents a 2x increase. YouTube says this increase is partially due to a large increase in hate speech removals.

While these stats show a stark increase in content being removed for violating YouTube’s “hate speech” rules, these new rules were only in place for one of the three months during this quarter which suggests that even more content could be removed in future quarters where these new “hate speech” rules are in effect for the entire three months. YouTube seems to allude to this when discussing the impact of these rules and said that it can take “months for us to ramp up enforcement of a new policy”:

“Our hate speech update represented one such fundamental shift in our policies. We spent months carefully developing the policy and working with our teams to create the necessary trainings and tools required to enforce it. The policy was launched in early June, and as our teams review and remove more content in line with the new policy, our machine detection will improve in tandem. Though it can take months for us to ramp up enforcement of a new policy, the profound impact of our hate speech policy update is already evident in the data released in this quarter’s Community Guidelines Enforcement Report.”

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