In an effort to clean up the content hosted on their website, YouTube has announced plans this week to begin flagging and removing all Anime Vine Compilation videos. YouTube has seen an increase in controversial featured content in recent years leading many to question YouTube’s decisions in regards to content moderation. Videos with misleading titles and questionable thumbnail images commonly display on the site’s home page drawing much criticism from some of YouTube’s older content creators. In response, YouTube has stated that it intends to remove the subcategory of video it feels is the most abusive, Anime Vine Compilations.

According to YouTube, Anime Vine Compilations constitute the most common type of video to violate the YouTube Community Guidelines. Such videos often violate YouTube’s guidelines concerning excessively violent behavior, offensive or hateful speech, sexual content, and failing to demonstrate a bare minimum level of video editing proficiency and originality. YouTube stated that by removing the offending videos they hope to improve the quality of the YouTube community and encourage the demonstration of higher quality content.

“We reviewed site-wide video analytics and found a shockingly high correlation between Anime Vines and abusive content,” revealed YouTube Community Manager Terisa Theinbach. “In addition, we found that a large portion of hateful speech and spam is tied to the comment sections of these videos. By removing these videos we hope to garner a stronger connection with our partners and encourage positivity throughout the YouTube community.”

YouTube additionally revealed that the most common comment spam message, “what anime?”, was overwhelmingly posted on Anime Vine Compilations. The second most common spam message, “boku no pico”, tended to follow such comments in almost all cases. YouTube went on to explain that despite improvements in spam filtering techniques, filtering out such a large quantity of outdated unoriginal jokes is beyond the capabilities of current web technologies. YouTube estimates that by removing the entire videos, over three quarters of global site spam would be eliminated.

Originally with the announcement of Vine’s discontinuation by parent company Twitter, YouTube had predicted that the flow of poorly constructed videos would cease within a matter of weeks. Contrarily, the content only seems to have continued to be uploaded at a consistent pace with no sign of stopping. YouTube suspects that many of the videos are uploaded by internet bots as many of the videos share similar footage and simply rephrase previous video titles.

YouTube has yet to announce how it plans to deal with the recent emergence of “Anime Cracks”, a type of video involving stringing together poorly encoded video clips of anime with overlaid audio from Adam Sandler movies. Rumors speculate that YouTube will simply remove all content related to anime in the near future in order to resolve the ongoing issues moderating user content.

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