Developing policies for a global platform

Before we do the work of removing content that violates our policies, we have to make sure the line between what we remove and what we allow is drawn in the right place — with a goal of preserving free expression, while also protecting and promoting a vibrant community. To that end, we have a dedicated policy development team that systematically reviews all of our policies to ensure that they are current, keep our community safe, and do not stifle YouTube’s openness.After reviewing a policy, we often discover that fundamental changes aren’t needed, but still uncover areas that are vague or confusing to the community. As a result, many updates are actually clarifications to our existing guidelines. For example, earlier this year we provided more detail about when we consider a “challenge” to be too dangerous for YouTube. Since 2018, we’ve made dozens of updates to our enforcement guidelines, many of them minor clarifications but some more substantive.For particularly complex issues, we may spend several months developing a new policy. During this time we consult outside experts and YouTube creators to understand how our current policy is falling short, and consider regional differences to make sure proposed changes can be applied fairly around the world.Our hate speech update represented one such fundamental shift in our policies. We spent months carefully developing the policy and working with our teams to create the necessary trainings and tools required to enforce it. The policy was launched in early June, and as our teams review and remove more content in line with the new policy, our machine detection will improve in tandem. Though it can take months for us to ramp up enforcement of a new policy, the profound impact of our hate speech policy update is already evident in the data released in this quarter’s Community Guidelines Enforcement Report:





The spikes in removal numbers are in part due to the removal of older comments, videos and channels that were previously permitted. In April 2019, we announced that we are also working to update our harassment policy, including creator-on-creator harassment. We’ll share our progress on this work in the coming months.

