YouTube has announced a new measure to tackle the rampant spam problem on the platform. The company will soon start warning spammers who post violative comments. If a comment violates YouTube’s Community Guidelines, it will be removed and the author of that comment will be warned against making such comments in the future. If they continue the abusive behavior, YouTube will temporarily block comments for them for up to 24 hours.
According to the company, these warnings and timeouts showed great potential during testing. They “reduce the likelihood of users leaving violative comments again”. At launch, this feature will only work for English comments. The company plans to add support for more languages in the coming months. Since it relies on machine-powered automated detection, YouTube notes that it may not always get things right. As such, users who receive such warnings can give feedback if they feel the machine got it wrong.
“Our goal is to both protect creators from users trying to negatively impact the community via comments, as well as offer more transparency to users who may have had comments removed to policy violations and hopefully help them understand our Community Guidelines,” said YouTube Community Manager Rob in the official announcement. This announcement adds that the company has improved its automated spam detection systems as well as spambot detection in live chats.
YouTube is cracking down on comment spammers
Earlier this year, several prominent YouTube creators, including Linus Tech Tips and MKBHD, made videos highlighting the spam problem on the platform. The company has since doubled down on its efforts against spammers. It claims to have removed 1.1 billion spammy comments between January and June of this year. YouTube is also continuously upgrading its machine learning models to better detect new types of spam as spammers change their tactics to work around existing models.
Simultaneously, it is putting new measures in place to reduce spam. This is the latest in a string of measures YouTube has announced against comment spammers in recent months. In April, YouTube rolled out an experimental feature for creators to increase the strictness of potentially inappropriate comments, which are held for review. It followed up with a host of new policies that prevent commenters from impersonating big creators.
This warning system should now help further eliminate spammers from YouTube. As the company says, “reducing spam and abuse in comments and live chat is an ongoing task” and these kinds of small changes can have a big impact in the long run.
2022-12-14 15:20:29