YouTube has taken down 220 million videos since 2018

Now it’s getting a little less strict on what’s allowed on the site, per The New York Times.

6/11/25 5:46AM

According to a report from The New York Times on Monday, YouTube’s content moderation policies have been quietly relaxed after more lenient new guidelines were introduced in mid-December.

Alphabet’s video platform — which reportedly supported 490,000 jobs and contributed $55 billion to the US economy last year — joins Meta platforms and Elon Musk’s X in revising its approach to content moderation. Unlike those two, however, YouTube hasn’t made any public statement about the move, though a spokesperson told the Times that it continuously updates its guidance for moderators.

New rules

YouTube workers are now advised to keep policy-contravening content up if it’s in the public interest and less than half of the video breaks the site’s code of conduct; previously, that threshold was a quarter of the video. Videos are in the public interest if creators “discuss or debate elections, ideologies, movements, race, gender, sexuality, abortion, immigration, censorship and other issues,” the Times reported from training materials it accessed.

Google’s quarterly transparency report shows that millions of videos are still taken off YouTube every single month.

YouTube total content moderation total chart — Sherwood News

In Q1 2025, the first quarter after YouTube’s new policies had come into play, the site took down some 8.6 million videos for breaching community guidelines. Worryingly, over half of those videos were removed for breaking YouTube’s child safety terms, though almost 55% of the content was actioned before it received a single view, thanks to YouTube’s automatic flagging system.

Indeed, when automated flagging is taken out of the YouTube moderation picture, there’s not actually all that much left. From the start of 2018, just ~19.9 million video removals came from human detection, with more than 90% stemming from the site’s AI-powered moderation system, which has been accused of being a little trigger-happy in the past.

#10

Rani Molla4h

Tesla just recalled its beleaguered Cybertruck for the 10th time since the vehicle was introduced two years ago. This time the company recalled about 6,000 of the “apocalypse-proof” vehicles due to what the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says is an improperly installed “optional off-road light bar accessory” that could become disconnected from the windshield while driving, and could “create a road hazard for following motorists and increase their risk of a collision.”

CEO Elon Musk once said he could sell up to 500,000 of the stainless steel behemoths a year. In the first three quarters of this year, the company has sold only about 16,000.

Jon Keegan

FUNGIBLE FLEET

Microsoft: Forget what we said, we are going to keep spending on capex

Last quarter, the company offered guidance that its capex spending would be lower in the second half of the fiscal year. Yesterday it said spending would go up.

Microsoft Celebrates Its 50th Anniversary With Copilot AI Event

Rani Molla6h

Analysts lower Meta price targets after social media giant says AI capex will keep climbing

Meta may have posted record revenue Wednesday but the stock is deeply in the red in the wake of its third-quarter earnings report, after the social media company said that its capital expenditure on AI would continue to rise.

The earnings prompted a number of analysts to lower their price targets or downgrade the stock.

RBC Capital lowered its price target to $810 from $840. Bank of America Securities lowered its price target to $810 from $900. Barclays, JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, and Wells Fargo also lowered their price targets on the company.

Earlier today, Benchmark downgraded its rating to a “hold” from a “buy.” Oppenheimer downgraded the company to “perform” from “outperform,” saying the “significant investment in Superintelligence despite unknown revenue opportunity mirrors 2021/2022 Metaverse spending.” Ouch.

Rani Molla

Capex marks the spot

Big Tech capex approaches $100 billion and Dan Ives loves it

AI spending shows no signs of flagging.