Google takes down thousands of YouTube channels in China: Here’s why

It is notable that the suspended channels and blogs uploaded mainly spammy content in Chinese about entertainment, music and lifestyle. “A very small subset uploaded content in Chinese and English about China and US foreign affairs,” said the company.

Moreover, the company has also terminated three YouTube channels which shared sensational content in Chinese which was related to war in Ukraine and connected to relations between mainland China and Taiwan.

So far the company also terminated 515 YouTube channels as a part of its investigation process which were linked to influence operations with Azerbaijan and 57 YouTube channels in Brazil.

“We terminated one AdSense account and blocked one domain from eligibility to appear on Google News surface as part of our investigation into coordinated influence operations linked to China,” said Google.

The video streaming platform, has removed 5.6 million videos from its platform in the months of July and September 2022 citing violation of their community guidelines.

The platform has received over 271,000 removal appeals during the two months. After reviewing the content, it reinstated about 29,000 appeals, stated YouTube in its latest blog.

According to YouTube, From July through September of this year, for every 10,000 views, between 10 and 11 were of content that violated the community guidelines.

Moreover, the platform has also tracked the number of appeals submitted by creators in response to videos that are removed, as this will help to gain a clearer understanding of the accuracy of its systems.

Additionally, the blog also stated that preventing egregious real-world harm, however, doesn’t mean that it would remove all offensive content from YouTube as it generally believes that “open debate and free expression” leads to better societal outcomes.

“But we’re careful to draw the line around content that may cause egregious harm to our users or to the platform,” the blog post said.