Google Removes Thousands Of YouTube Channels Over Spam Reports

Mountain View, California: Search engine giant Google has removed several thousand YouTube channels in November as part of its ongoing investigation into coordinated influence operations linked to China.

These YouTube channels and blogs mostly uploaded spam content in Chinese about music, entertainment, and lifestyle.

“Very small subset uploaded content in Chinese and English about China and US foreign affairs,” said the company. The company also terminated three YouTube channels that shared sensational content in Chinese that was about the war in Ukraine and relations between mainland China and Taiwan.

The company also terminated 515 YouTube channels as part of its investigation into coordinated influence operations linked to Azerbaijan and 57 YouTube channels in Brazil.

“We terminated 1 AdSense account and blocked 1 domain from eligibility to appear on Google News surfaces as part of our investigation into coordinated influence operations linked to China,” said Google.

Google-owned YouTube said last month it removed over 1.7 million videos in India for violating its Community Guidelines in its third quarter (Q3) report. In the same period, the streaming platform removed over 5.6 million videos globally for violating its community guidelines.

According to the Community Guidelines Enforcement report, more than 94 per cent of these videos were first flagged by machines rather than humans.