YouTube is one of the biggest websites and video sharing companies in the world. This means two things come alongside it. The first being more problems with the users and the second being the attempt to please advertisers.

In the third quarter of 2018, Business Insider reported that YouTube had removed more than a whopping 58 million videos and even more astonishing was the 224 million comments. The videos and comments were removed due to violations of policies that are set in place and expected to be followed by the users.

This pushback towards enforcement of policies was said to have happened after YouTube, as well as other social media platforms, received government pressure to remove extremist content. In fact, the European Union actually proposed the idea of steep fines for platforms that did not remove extremist material.

YouTube started issuing quarterly reports on their efforts to combat policy violations. Apparently, the most common thing removed was spam. Most of the content was found using automated detection tools. During September, around 90 percent of the videos removed had less than 10 views on them. 10,400 videos have been removed for extremist content while another 279,600 videos were taken down due to child safety issues.

The video company also relies on users to report content that violates policies. In this case, content that might have been spread around and slipped passed the detection tool could be directly brought to attention due to users reporting it.

This also comes after something known in the community as the Adpocalypse. It was a time where many advertisers found out that their ads could have been played on videos that were controversial, which they may not have wanted to be associated with. This led to YouTube having to introduce new monetization policies and possibly be more active in the enforcement aspect of policy violations for videos.

YouTube does have to be careful with how they manage the removal of content. Some people might have a different definition of what a policy defines. This means that if they removed the wrong video for a violation, it could lead to some users leaving the platform or refusing to support it in any way. That would be bad as YouTube requires two things, the users and the advertisers to be successful. If one of those disappears, the platform cannot survive.


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