In aid of creators: YouTube toughens comment section tools vs spam, abuse

YouTube on Tuesday has announced new tool and improvements on its comment section tools to resist spams, bots, and abusive language. The platform says that such issues are some headaches of creators today and has put a priority to tackle them to ‘improve the comments experience for everyone’.

A new tool YouTube introduced is the comment removal warnings and timeouts. The system detects and warns users who may have violated the community guidelines then removes their comments. It escalates into a 24 hour ban if the same user keeps on leaving abusive comments.

Testing showed that the warnings or timeouts reduce likelihood of users leaving offensive comments again.

Improvements on spam and bot detection are also underway. YouTube said that the automated spam detection has removed over 1.1 billion spammy comments in the first six months of this year. Though spammers change tactics, their machine learning models continue to improve in detecting new types of spam. It goes the same for bot detection in live chats, where it negatively impacts the live streaming experience, said YouTube.

“Our goal is to both protect creators from users trying to negatively impact the community via comments, as well as offer more transparency to users who may have had comments removed to policy violations and hopefully help them understand our Community Guidelines,” said Rob of TeamYouTube.

“Of course our systems don’t always get it right, so users who receive these warnings can give feedback to help us know if we’ve gotten it wrong,” it added.