“Think before you upload”: an in-depth analysis of unavailable videos on YouTube

YouTube strives to moderate its content by censoring, demonetizing or removing videos that allegedly violate their community guidelines. Such strategies, especially if seen as unjust by the affected users, could be met with resentment, anger, and in some cases, violence. In addition to YouTube removing videos, uploaders sometimes delete their videos for a variety of reasons, such as paraphrasing or preserving online self-image. In this paper, we provide a detailed analysis of videos removed by YouTube or deleted by the uploader. To do this, we tracked over 73,000 recent YouTube videos for 1 week and identified those that got deleted or removed. We have then conducted a large-scale analysis of this data and reported on the most informative features that distinguish deleted/removed videos from the ones that remain available, as well as the features that distinguish videos removed by YouTube from those deleted by the uploader. Based on our analysis, we have developed machine learning prediction models that predict videos that will get deleted or removed at three different stages of a video’s lifetime, namely at the time of posting, 3 h after a video has been posted, and after up to 7 days have elapsed. Our findings indicate that we can predict video deletion/removal with high accuracy even at the time of posting—a strategy that could help users perceive the removal of their videos as fair as well as reduce public and moderators exposure to problematic videos.