YouTube took down more than 58 million videos and 224 million comments during the third quarter based on violations of its policies, the company said on Thursday.

Google's Youtube said that From July to September of 2018, the company's teams removed over 224 million comments for violating the company's Community Guidelines. The majority of removals were for spam and the total number of removals represents a fraction of the billions of comments posted on YouTube each quarter. In addition, during the same period, Youtube removed 7.8 million videos. The 81% of these videos were first detected by machines, and of those detected by machines, 74.5% had never received a single view, Youtube said.

Government officials in the United States, Europe and Asia have been pressuring YouTube, Facebook and other social media services to quickly identify and remove extremist and hateful content that critics have said incite violence.

The European Union has proposed online services should face steep fines unless they remove extremist material within one hour of a government order to do so.

Youtube uses automated detection tools to quickly identify spam, extremist content and nudity. During September, 90 percent of the nearly 10,400 videos removed for violent extremism or 279,600 videos removed for child safety issues received fewer than 10 views, according to YouTube.

However, detecting material promoting hateful rhetoric and dangerous behavior remains a challenge, since aAutomated detection technologies for those policies are relatively new and less efficient. As a result, YouTube relies on users to report potentially problematic videos or comments. This means that the content may be viewed widely before being removed.

The third-quarter removal data for the first time revealed the number of YouTube accounts Youtube disabled for either having three policy violations in 90 days or committing what the company found to be an egregious violation, such as uploading child pornography.

YouTube said it removed about 1.67 million channels and all of the 50.2 million videos that were available from them. Nearly 80 percent of the channel takedowns related to spam uploads, YouTube said. About 13 percent concerned nudity, and 4.5 percent child safety.

"We are committed to making sure that YouTube remains a vibrant community, where creativity flourishes, independent creators make their living, and people connect worldwide over shared passions and interests. That means we will be unwavering in our fight against bad actors on our platform and our efforts to remove egregious content before it is viewed. We know there is more work to do and we are continuing to invest in people and technology to remove violative content quickly," Youtube said.