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Ever wonder how YouTube works?
Every day, millions of people come to YouTube to be informed, inspired, or just plain delighted. Over time, questions have come up about how YouTube works, so we’ve created this site to provide some answers – and explain what we’re doing to foster a responsible platform the users, creators, and artists who make up our community can rely on.
Our commitmentsDiscover what we’re doing for our community
Making YouTube safer
At the heart of our approach are the four Rs – we Remove content that violates our policies, Reduce the spread of harmful misinformation and borderline material, Raise up authoritative sources for news and information, and Reward trusted Creators.
How does YouTube manage harmful content?
What is the difference between hate speech and harassment?
How does YouTube combat misinformation?
Does YouTube contribute to radicalization?
How does YouTube support civic engagement and stay secure, impartial, and fair during elections?
What does YouTube do to prevent bias?
How does YouTube help keep kids protected on the platform?
How does YouTube maintain user privacy?
How does YouTube protect copyrighted content?
How does YouTube support users’ digital wellbeing?
How has YouTube responded to the global COVID-19 crisis?
How Authoritative news and information
Youtube Authoritative health information
Overview
YouTube has always had a set of Community Guidelines that outline what type of content isn’t allowed on YouTube. These policies apply to all types of content on our platform, including videos, comments, links, and thumbnails. Our Community Guidelines are a key part of our broader suite of policies and are regularly updated in consultation with outside experts and YouTube creators to keep pace with emerging challenges.
We enforce these Community Guidelines using a combination of human reviewers and machine learning, and apply them to everyone equally—regardless of the subject or the creator’s background, political viewpoint, position, or affiliation.
Our policies aim to make YouTube a safer community while still giving creators the freedom to share a broad range of experiences and perspectives.
How does YouTube develop new policies and update existing ones?
Each of our policies is carefully thought through so they are consistent, well-informed, and can be applied to content from around the world. They’re developed in consultation with a wide range of external industry and policy experts, as well as YouTube Creators. New policies go through multiple rounds of testing before they go live to ensure our global team of content reviewers can apply them accurately and consistently.
This work is never finished, and we are always evaluating our policies to understand how we can better strike a balance between keeping the YouTube community protected and giving everyone a voice.
How does YouTube enforce its Community Guidelines?
500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That’s a lot of content, which is why our teams come together to make sure that what you see on our platform follows our Community Guidelines. To do that, we combine the power of advanced machine learning systems and our community itself to flag potentially problematic content. Our expert reviewers then remove flagged content that violates our Community Guidelines.
How does YouTube identify content that violates Community Guidelines?
With hundreds of hours of new content uploaded to YouTube every minute, we use a combination of people and machine learning to detect problematic content at scale. Machine learning is well-suited to detect patterns, which helps us to find content similar to other content we’ve already removed, even before it’s viewed.
We also recognize that the best way to quickly remove content is to anticipate problems before they emerge. Our Intelligence Desk monitors the news, social media, and user reports to detect new trends surrounding inappropriate content, and works to make sure our teams are prepared to address them before they can become a larger issue.
Is there a way for the broader community to flag harmful content?
The YouTube community also plays an important role in flagging content they think is inappropriate.
- If you see content that you think violates Community Guidelines, you can use our flagging feature to submit content for review.
- We developed the YouTube Trusted Flagger program to provide robust content reporting processes to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with expertise in a policy area, government agencies, and individuals with high flagging accuracy rates. Participants receive training on YouTube policies and have a direct path of communication with our Trust & Safety specialists. Videos flagged by Trusted Flaggers are not automatically removed. They are subject to the same human review as videos flagged by any other user, but we may expedite review by our teams. NGOs also receive occasional online training on YouTube policies.
How does YouTube treat educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic content?
Sometimes videos that might otherwise violate our Community Guidelines may be allowed to stay on YouTube if the content offers a compelling reason with visible context for viewers. We often refer to this exception as “EDSA,” which stands for “Educational, Documentary, Scientific or Artistic”. To help determine whether a video might qualify for an EDSA exception, we look at multiple factors, including the video title, descriptions, and the context provided.
EDSA exceptions are a critical way we make sure that important speech stays on YouTube, while protecting the wider YouTube ecosystem from harmful content.
What action does YouTube take for content that violates Community Guidelines?
Machine learning systems help us identify and remove spam automatically, as well as remove re-uploads of content we’ve already reviewed and determined violates our policies. YouTube takes action on other flagged videos after review by trained human reviewers. They assess whether the content does indeed violate our policies, and protect content that has an educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic purpose. Our reviewer teams remove content that violates our policies and age-restrict content that may not be appropriate for all audiences. Reviewers’ inputs are then used to train and improve the accuracy of our systems at a much larger scale.
Community Guidelines Strikes
If our reviewers decide that content violates our Community Guidelines, we remove the content and send a notice to the Creator. The first time a Creator violates our Community Guidelines, they receive a warning with no penalty to the channel. After one warning, we’ll issue a Community Guidelines strike to the channel and the account will have temporary restrictions including not being allowed to upload videos, live streams, or stories for a 1-week period. Channels that receive three strikes within a 90-day period will be terminated. Channels that are dedicated to violating our policies or that have a single case of severe abuse of the platform, will bypass our strikes system and be terminated. All strikes and terminations can be appealed if the Creator believes there was an error, and our teams will re-review the decision.
Age-Restricting Content
Sometimes content doesn’t violate our Community Guidelines, but may not be appropriate for viewers under 18 years of age. In these cases, our review team will place an age restriction on the video so it will not be visible to viewers under 18 years of age, logged-out users, or to those who have Restricted Mode enabled. Creators can also choose to age restrict their own content at upload if they think it’s not suitable for younger audiences.