Moderating your live chat makes your community more welcoming and healthier. YouTube gives you tools to help prevent harassment and make everyone feel safe.
How to Moderate Live Chat on YouTube
Before your live chat
Get ready for your live chat session by setting up these moderation tools. Some of these tools can be used during and after your live stream too.
Subscribers-only live chatIf eligible, you can make live chat only available to your subscribers, and you can specify for how long viewers need to be subscribed. This setting can be changed before and during your live stream or Premiere.
When you turn on subscribers-only chat, your audience will be notified that it's turned on and for how long they need to be subscribed to send messages.
Slow mode and subscribers-only chat can be turned on at the same time. Members-only chat and subscribers-only chat can't be turned on at the same time.
To turn on subscribers-only chat:
- Go to Live Control Room.
- From your live stream, click Edit.
- Click Live chat.
- Under 'Who can send a message', select Subscribers.
- Optional: Choose how long viewers need to be subscribed before they can send live chat messages.
- Click Save.
Note: If a viewer participates in a subscriber-only live chat, other viewers will publicly see that they're subscribed to the channel.
Assign moderators
Everyone who participates in a live chat can report or block another person. Moderators can:
- Delete messages. Deleting is a way for you to remove any inappropriate or potentially abusive or offensive content. When you delete a message, it's permanently removed from the live chat and its replay.
- Put participants in timeout. Timeouts allow you to temporarily prevent someone from sending messages in live chat. When you put someone in timeout, they won't be able to send messages for five minutes.
- Hide people from the channel. Hiding is often reserved for participants who ignore guidelines and warnings, and repeatedly send inappropriate messages. When you hide someone from the channel, their chat messages and comments will no longer be visible to other viewers. YouTube doesn't notify the person that you've hidden them.
Review potentially inappropriate messages. Creators might choose to get YouTube's system to hold potentially inappropriate chat messages for review. Moderators can choose to show or hide each message.
- Open YouTube Studio.
- From the left, click Settings
Community.
- From the Automated filters tab, click in the 'Moderators' box.
- Type the name of the user that you want to make a moderator.
- Click Save.
Select menu
Block messages containing certain words
- Open YouTube Studio.
- From the left, click Settings
Community.
- From the Automated filters tab
'Blocked words', enter a list of blocked words. Messages containing any of these words will be blocked from your live chat.
- Click Save.
Hold potentially inappropriate live chat messages for review
- Go to YouTube Studio.
- From the left, tap Settings
Community
Defaults.
- Under 'Messages in your live chat', tick or untick Hold potentially inappropriate chat messages for review.
- If you select SHOW: chat messages are displayed in the chat stream at the original time that they were entered.
- If you select HIDE: chat messages remain hidden from viewers.
- If you take no action: chat messages remain hidden from viewers.
Slow mode
- Create a live stream.
- Click Edit.
- Click Customisation.
- Under 'Message delay', tick Slow mode. Enter how long you want participants to wait between sending messages.
Members-only live chat
- Sign in to YouTube Studio.
- At the top right, click CREATE
Go live .
- From the left-hand menu, click Stream.
- Create a stream:
- To copy a previous stream: Select a previous stream and click Reuse settings.
- To create a new stream: Enter your stream's info and click Create stream.
- From the top right-hand corner, click Edit.
- Under 'Live chat', select Enable members-only chat.
- Click Save.
Turn live chat on or off
You can turn live chat on or off at any time, even after the event has started.
From the top right, click Edit Live Chat
Enable live chat.
During your live chat
Moderate messages and viewers from the live chat feed
- Delete the message.
- Place the user in time out.
- Hide the user from the chat message feed or comments section on your channel.
Tip: Moderators can learn about a live chat participant by going directly to their channel.
- On computer: Hover over a message, click More
and then Go to channel.
- On mobile: Tap a message, and then Go to channel.
Hide or unhide a viewer from live chat
- From the live chat feed, find a message from the viewer that you want to hide.
- Next to the message, click More
Hide user.
- Open YouTube Studio.
- From the left, click Settings
Community.
- From the Automated filters tab
'Hidden users', type the name of the viewer you want to hide.
- To unhide a viewer, click the X next to their name. They can now leave comments and live chat messages on your channel.
- Click Save.
After your live chat
Live chat replay
- Go to youtube.com/my_videos.
- Click the Live tab.
- Select a video.
- Click the More options tab.
- Deselect the box next to 'Allow live chat replay'.
View or delete your Live chat history
- Go to History.
- On the right-hand side of the page, click Live chat.
- Scroll down and find the live chat message. To delete it, hover over it and click X.