Google-owned YouTube has removed over 2.25 million videos in India for violating its community guidelines in the fourth quarter of 2023, the popular video streaming platform said in a report on Tuesday.

The number of videos removed from the platform between October and December 2023 in India is the highest among 30 nations, YouTube said in the report.

Singapore (1,243,871) and the US (788,354) had the second and third-highest number of videos removed. Iraq emerged the last with 41,176 videos removed.

Globally, 9 million videos were removed by YouTube during the same period, and a whopping 96 per cent of videos were first flagged by machines.

Of these 53.46 per cent were removed before they received a single view and 27.07 per cent received between 1 and 10 views before removal, Youtube said in a statement. “YouTube’s Community Guidelines are enforced consistently across the globe, regardless of the uploader, where the content is uploaded, or how the content was generated. When content is removed for violating our guidelines, it is removed globally and policies are enforced using a combination of machine learning and human reviewers,” the social media platform said.

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Further, YouTube also removed over 20 million channels in Q4 2023 for violating “spam policies, including but not restricted to scams, misleading metadata or thumbnails, video and comments spam”.

More than 1.1 billion comments were also weeded out, the majority of which were spam. Over 99 per cent of removed comments were detected automatically, YouTube said.