Official Blog
Broadcast Yourself
Why flagging matters
Thursday, September 15, 2016
YouTube allows people anywhere to share their stories with the world. They share their sense of humor, their talents, their opinions, what’s happening around them and within them. YouTube is also a community, and over the years, people have used the flagging feature located beneath every video and comment to help report content they believe violates our
Community Guidelines
.
We want to empower you, the YouTube community, to better understand how flagging works and how you can get involved in maintaining our community guidelines. To shed some light on how your flagging activity has helped keep YouTube a platform where openness and creative expression are balanced with responsibility, here are some of the latest data:
Over 90 million people have flagged videos on YouTube since 2006 - that’s more than the population of Egypt - and over a third of these people have flagged more than one video.
As YouTube grows, the community continues to be very active in flagging content: the number of flags per day is up over 25 percent year-on-year.
Community flagging on YouTube is international: People from 196 countries have flagged a video. The five countries with the most accurate flagging rates are: Indonesia, Turkey, Germany, Ukraine and France.
We’re also continuing to strengthen our policy enforcement processes: In 2015 alone, we removed 92 million videos for violation of our
policies
through a mix of user flagging and our spam-detection technology. While we are vigilant and fast in removing terrorist content and hate speech, it's worth noting that it actually represents a very small proportion of the content that violates our guidelines - those two violations account for only 1 percent of the videos removed in 2015.
When flagging, you can report which policy you think a video violates, from spam and sexual content to harassment and violent content. This helps us route and review flagged content more efficiently and effectively:
We have trained teams, fluent in multiple languages, who carefully evaluate your flags 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year in time zones around the world. They remove content that violates our terms, age-restrict content that may not be appropriate for all audiences, and are careful to leave content up if it hasn’t crossed the line. As YouTube grows, we continue to scale our policy enforcement resources to meet your needs as a community.
Flagged content, however, doesn’t automatically get removed. YouTube is an important global platform for information and news, and our teams evaluate videos before taking action in order to protect content that has an educational, documentary, scientific or artistic purpose.
We also take into account local laws in the countries where we operate and if we receive a
valid legal notice
that content violates a local law, we will restrict that content in the local country domain. You can find information about government removal requests in
Google’s Transparency Report
. Similarly, if we remove content for policy reasons after receiving a valid legal request, we will include that in our transparency reporting.
We want to encourage you to continue flagging and we hope this additional transparency will help you continue reporting responsibly. For more information about how these processes work, visit our
Policy and Safety Hub
.
Posted by Juniper Downs, Head of YouTube Public Policy, who recently watched “
Leon Bridges' NPR Tiny Desk Concert
.”
Labels
3D
4k
accessibility
account info
activism
ads
africa
annotations
arts
awards
benefit
betas
bizblog
blogs
bulletins
buzz
captions
celebrity playlists
channels
chrome
citizen journalism
citizen reporting
citizentube
comedy
comments
community
community guidelines
contests
creator's corner
creators
curators
customization
dance
design
discovery
doodle
editor
education
embeds
entertainment
events
facebook
film
flagging
gaming
gmail
google
google tv
government
grants
groups
guidelines
hd
help center
holidays
homepage
howto
inspiration
investment
jobs
journalism
life in a day
live stream
marketing
meetups
mobile
moderator
movies
music
musicians wanted
news
nonprofits
open-source
partners
playlists
policy
politics
privacy
product update
quicklist
ratings
rentals
research
safety
science and technology
screening room
search
sharing
shows
social networks
sports
staff
stats and data
store
subscriptions
tags
test tube
travel
trends
tv
twitter
upload
vevo
video editing
video production
video volunteers
viral video
youtube api
youtube direct
Archive
2018
Mar
Feb
Jan
2017
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2016
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2007
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2006
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2005
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Feed
YouTube
on
Follow @youtube
Follow
Learn more in the
YouTube Help Center
.
Follow