Reporting YouTube videos

Filed under: Net Video
2 Comments

Some day it may happen that you come across a YouTube video that violates the service's community guidelines. For example, the video may contain hate speech, or dangerous illegal acts, or other stuff that's prohibited on YouTube.

If you do encounter such a video, here's what to do:

  1. If the video in question is embedded in another page, go to the YouTube page for that video.
  2. Sign in to your user account. If you don't have a user account, sign up for one. If you're not willing to sign up for one, find someone who has one and ask them to perform the following steps.
  3. Find the "Flag" button, below the bottom-right corner of the video, just under the "Views" count.
  4. Click that Flag button.
  5. Select a category/reason that you're flagging the video.
  6. If it asks you to indicate when in the video the objectionable content starts, enter approximate minutes and seconds.
  7. Click the "Flag This Video" button.

The YouTube staff will review the video, usually within an hour. If the staff determines that the video violates the guidelines, then they'll remove it.

Note that this technique/approach is way way more effective at getting a video removed than doing things like blogging about it or signing a petition or posting a comment.

2 Responses to “Reporting YouTube videos”

  1. Will

    Is there a way to flag offensive/hate-speech comments to a video which is itself fine?

    reply

  2. Jed

    Don’t know, but don’t think so—I think the way to deal with comments is to click the thumbs-down button (which I think only works when you’re logged in), and when enough people do that, I think the comment gets hidden by default.

    But I’m not sure.

    If the comments are on your video, you can delete them and/or block the person who posted them from posting more.

    And you can view comments with certain words blocked.

    But TSOR isn’t turning up anything about reporting comments that violate community guidelines. I’ll see if I can find out more about that, but my guess is there’s no way to do it.

    reply

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