YouTube is bombed every minute with videos that contradict its various guidelines, whether they are pornography, copyrighted material, violence and extremism, or dangerous misleading information, and a group of systems confront this bombing.
The Google-owned YouTube company has tried to improve its artificial intelligence computer systems in recent years to prevent most of the so-called infringing videos from being uploaded to the site, but it is still under scrutiny for failing to limit the spread of dangerous content.
In an effort to prove its effectiveness in finding and removing rule-breaking videos, the company on Tuesday unveiled a new metric, "Violation View Rate."
This is the percentage of total views on YouTube that come from videos that don't follow its guidelines before removing the videos.
YouTube, in a post on its blog, said that violating videos represented 0.16% to 0.18% of all views on the platform in the fourth quarter of 2020.
In other words, out of every 10,000 views on YouTube, 16-18 of them violated YouTube's rules and were removed.
"We have made a lot of progress, which is a very, very low number, but of course we want it to be lower," said Jennifer O'Connor, director of the Trust and Safety Team at YouTube.
The company said the offending viewership has improved from 3 years ago, standing at 0.63% to 0.72% in the fourth quarter of 2017.
The number of violations is small, but the impact is large
YouTube said it had not disclosed the total number of times the violating videos were viewed before it was removed.
This reluctance to reveal the number of views of this number highlights the challenges facing platforms, such as YouTube and Facebook, that depend on user-generated content and how a single harmful substance may have a significant impact.
Even if YouTube makes progress in capturing and removing blocked content - the AI systems detect 94% of problematic videos before they are shown, according to the company - the total views remain a staggering number because the number of users of the platform is so huge.
O'Connor said YouTube decided to disclose a percentage instead of the total, as it helps determine how important the offending content is as opposed to the full content on the system as a whole.
YouTube released the metric, which the company has been tracking for years, as part of a quarterly report showing how to apply its guidelines.
In the report, YouTube provided the total number of rejected videos (83 million) and comments (7 billion) it removed since 2018.