The free video streaming platform YouTube took down around 2.25 million videos in India between October and December 2023. The removal was due to the breaching of community guidelines.

In total, YouTube removed over 9 million videos worldwide, with India topping the list and Singapore having the second most takedown of videos, with 1,243,871 videos removed. The USA was in third place on the removal list, with 788,354 videos erased. 

Indonesia was fourth on the list with 770,157 videos deleted and Russia was fifth with 516,629 videos removed. The Google-owned site did this global video purge amid the videos failing to obey the community guidelines and standards. According to the reports, over 96% of the videos removed were first flagged by AI and then screened by humans. 

The videos were removed for showcasing harmful, dangerous, violent, graphic, nudity, or sexual content posing a threat to child safety and violating the terms overall. 

India was at the top of the list of 30 countries with YouTube videos removed, totalling 2,254,902. Additionally, a total of 20.5 million channels were also removed by the platform for violation of the guidelines. Deleting a YouTube channel also deletes all the videos posted by it. This resulted in the deletion of 95.5 million YouTube videos in total. 

In a statement, YouTube clarified, "A YouTube channel is terminated if it accrues three community guidelines strikes in 90 days, has a single case of severe abuse (such as predatory behaviour), or is determined to be wholly dedicated to violating our guidelines (as is often the case with spam accounts)."

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