More than half of Americans believe that online vitriol and harassment make hate crimes more common, according to a December 2018 national survey from the Anti-Defamation League. Now, YouTube is doing something about the proliferation of hate on its video site. According to a blog post published on Tuesday (September 3), it took down five times more channels and videos promoting hate in the second quarter of the year than it did in the previous quarter. The equates to more than 100,000 individual videos, more than 17,000 channels and more than 500 million comments removed in the second quarter of the year.

“We've been removing harmful content since YouTube started, but our investment in this work has accelerated in recent years,” the post reads. YouTube attributes the spike in removals to going back to scrub older content and comments that were originally deemed okay before the company published updated hate speech guidelines in June.