YouTube has been struggling with spammers lately. Earlier this year, a bunch of big creators like MKBHD and Jacksepticeye made videos highlighting the seemingly endless hordes of bad actors swarming their channels who respond to other commenters with fake gifts and other scams. YouTube has responded to these complaints and today announced several new changes to try to stem the tide.
There are three new policies. First, channels will no longer be able to hide their subscriber count, a move often used by spammers to disguise themselves. This is because checking a channel’s subscriber count is a quick way to confirm that they are who they say they are (aka Big Name Content Creator X).
Second, YouTube limits the type and frequency of special characters that can be used in channel names. This is another common tactic of spammers, sometimes used in coordination with hidden subscribers. Essentially, spammers try to make channels look legitimate by using special characters to form familiar names. For example, calling your channel “¥ouⓉube” in an attempt to mimic the official YouTube account. Reducing the frequency of special characters reduces the ability they have to do so.
Third, YouTube is expanding access to an improved comment moderation setting it began testing earlier this year. The company now says that all creators can toggle the “increase strictness” setting in the “held for review” tab in the platform’s moderation tools. YouTube says this will reduce the number of spam/fraudulent comments, although with stricter filters there is always the risk of an increase in false positives as well.
These are a small number of relatively small changes, but it’s good that YouTube is still working to improve this problem.
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