Critics have long maintained that YouTube’s comments section is littered with spam and toxicity. Now the streaming video service is looking to weed out some of the worst offenders, if only for a little while.
YouTube has updated its policies on spam and abusive comments, saying it will now institute a policy of short-term bans for repeat offenders. A new feature will initially warn users who violate the community guidelines, but if they persist, their commenting privileges will be suspended for up to 24 hours.
“Our testing has shown that these warnings/timeouts reduce the likelihood of users leaving violative comments again,” the Alphabet property said in a statement.
The changes, for now, only impact comments made in English, but the company hopes to expand that to other languages in the coming months. YouTube says it’s trying to protect creators from trolls as well as offering transparency to people whose comments are removed. Previously, abusive comments would just be yanked, but there were no real repercussions for the people who left them.
As part of the cleanup effort, YouTube says it has also improved bot detection in live chats, which will hopefully cut back on the flood of spam and promotions that often accompanies discussions during live events. The company say it’s working on improving its machine learning models to remove spam in comments, as well.
The changes come three years after YouTube banned comments on most videos of kids to protect young creators from potential predatory behavior.
In the first six months of 2022, YouTube removed over 1.1 billion spam comments.
The company does note that spammers and trolls often change their tactics, which can confuse the algorithms, and that can even result in some warnings that are uncalled for.
“Reducing spam and abuse in comments and live chat is an ongoing task, so these updates will be ongoing as we continue to adapt to new trends,” it said.
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