Comment spam has been on the rise in recent weeks on the channels of several top YouTube creators. Many of them expressed their dismay with malicious comments intended to deceive their viewers. Faced with this situation, YouTube reacted…
Spam on YouTube is getting worse day by day
For some time, YouTube has a huge spam problem, Strongly punishing channels regardless of their size. In recent months, the biggest channels have fallen prey to comments that set traps for their users.
“From Cryptocurrency Scams To Health Supplements To Free Robux, It’s Only Getting Worse By The Day” According to Linus Sebastian of the Linus Tech Tips channel.
There can be many forms. While some comments can be potentially dangerous, others are highly malicious where spammers impersonate content creators to send messages directly, directing them to YouTube in some way to potentially deceive them. ,
Creators of big YouTube channels fight back
Faced with the magnitude of the situation, content creators retaliated and began publishing videos clearly highlighting the problem. Last April 1, for example, American producer Marques Brownlee (large YouTube channel “MKBHD”) declared spam. YouTube comments were “out of control” for months, It is beyond everyone’s skill to manage the problem effectively.
Sure, YouTube already has strategies in place for dealing with spam. The platform automatically removes large amounts of spam through automated reporting tools and systems. In the fourth quarter of 2021, the platform removed more than 950 million comments that violated YouTube’s rules, including spam. But apparently that was not enough.
A new anti-spam feature is being tested
In December 2021, the platform developed a new feature, recently unveiled by Marques Brownlee. This is a new filtering system Which analyzes and treats comments even more strictly.
This will show you a list of options for creators, along with a new checkbox called “Increase hardness”, which allows for even stricter moderation of comments.
As a reminder, spam is content that creates a negative experience and can sometimes be used to send unsolicited bulk messages to people without consent, according to Google. YouTube detects this based on the behavior of a particular commenter or the text of a comment. Comments can be recognized as spam if a user posts them repeatedly, for example.
The YouTube community can control the number of spam comments posted on videos with options to “report” or “report as spam or abuse” for comments.
To report a comment:
- Find the comment to report as spam;
- Click on the three verticals;
- Select “Unwanted or Spam Commercial Content”;
- Select “Report”.
To review reported comments on a YouTube channel or video:
- Open your YouTube Studio account;
- Select “Comments” from the left menu;
- Open the “Under Review” tab
You can then approve or remove them. This feature also allows you to hide users on your channel or report comments as spam or abuse. Note that comments marked as spam appear with the caption “under review” with “Potential Spam”.
The functionality, recently unveiled by Marques Brownlee, is still in the experimental stage. So it may take some time to roll out these controls in a reliable enough form for everyone to use.