Updates to reduce comment spam and impersonation on YouTube
Announcement
Hi everyone,
We know that comment and identity abuse-related spam is top of mind for the YouTube community, so today we’re sharing several updates that will help to better protect our viewers and creators from comment spam, as well as make it harder to impersonate creators.
These updates (outlined below) are part of our ongoing work - and while we know there will never be just one fix, we're committed to continuously evolving our strategies to meet the challenges of spam detection and reduction.
Updates:
- No longer allowing channels to ‘hide’ subscriber counts: To make it harder for people to impersonate other creators, YouTube channels will no longer be able to hide their subscriber counts as of July 29, 2022. We’ve seen bad actors hide their channels’ subscriber counts to impersonate larger, more prominent channels on YouTube - they pretend to be other creators in comments, then lure people to their impersonating channel page. We made this decision to help our community be safer as a whole but we recognize not all creators using this option are bad actors. We know some creators prefer to hide their subs count as they try to grow – if you want to learn more about establishing your fanbase, check out this resource.
- Improved creator comment moderation setting in YouTube Studio: All creators can use our new comment moderation setting to ‘Increase strictness’ in the “Held for review” tab. This is an optional feature that will filter out even more spam and identity abuse comments.
- Limiting the type and/or frequency of special characters in channel names: We’re reducing the character set available when choosing a channel name, as some characters can be used to impersonate channels. For example, channels won’t be able to update their name to something like” ¥ouⓉube✅” with this change.
We’ll monitor the comments below for questions and feedback, and we’ll keep you posted on our ongoing efforts to continue reducing impersonation and spam (in comments and beyond) on our platform.
- Meaghan, TeamYouTube
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Last edited Jun 30, 2022
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