YouTube’s Violative View Rate Methodology: A Statistical Assessment
White Paper, November 2021
To gauge YouTube’s progress in its efforts to remove policy-violative videos from its platform, YouTube calculates what it calls the Violative View Rate – the percentage of views of videos on the YouTube platform that violate its Community Guidelines. Google (YouTube’s parent company) retained Analysis Group academic affiliate Arnold Barnett to review the statistical methodologies behind YouTube’s calculation of the VVR metric. Professor Barnett reviewed company documents, interviewed Google’s data scientists, and analyzed the relevant illustrative summary data. In a report summarizing his work, he wrote that YouTube’s methodology for estimating the Violative View Rate was “thoroughly sensible and statistically sound,” and that it had “several salutary features that aid its efforts to strengthen and enforce its Community Guidelines.”