YouTube hopes to reduce comment spam with new measures

For those who use YouTube, spam comments are certainly a common occurrence. And for creators, it’s even more repetitive as the platform has been criticized for months for not being able to block comment spam messages.

However, it appears that this may now be changing. to Google disclosed which is testing a new feature aimed at reducing spam comments as well as possible identity theft from profiles of featured creators.

Creators now have access to a new option in YouTube Studio through which they can apply more stringent filters to the comments of their videos, aimed at filtering out the spam messages that flood them.

This system will flag comments that are considered spam for manual review by creators and provide an alternative to approving all existing comments.

In addition, the platform also implements some measures to prevent the impersonation of accounts by third parties. From July 29, YouTube channels will no longer be able to hide their subscriber count, which has been allowed until now, but was seen as a way for small spam accounts to hide their activity and try to deceive users.

This technique has often been used by spam accounts to try and prevent users from assessing whether an account is real or not. YouTube acknowledges that some creators may legally hide subscriber counts, but the company also believes these measures will make the entire platform more secure.

Finally, the platform also says that it will be more difficult to create an alternate channel using letters that are similar to those of established creators, as the platform will restrict the type of characters that can be used in channel names.