YouTube has been having a hard time with spammers lately.
Earlier this year, a group of big creators like MKBHD and Jacksepticeye made videos. Highlighting the seemingly endless hordes of bad actors swarming their channels responding to other commentators with fake giveaways and other scams.
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YouTube has responded to these complaints and today announced some new changes to try to stem the tide.
YouTube New Policies
There are three new policies.
First, channels will no longer be able to hide the number of subscribers, a move often used by spammers to blend in. This is because checking a channel’s subscriber count is a quick way to verify that they are who they say they are (aka Big Name Content Creator X).
Second, YouTube is limiting the type and frequency of special characters that can be used in channel names.
This is another common spammer tactic, sometimes used in coordination with hidden subscriber counting. Basically, spammers are trying 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 options available to them.
Third, YouTube is expanding access to an improved comment moderation setting that it began testing earlier this year.
The company now says that all creators can turn on the “increase rigor” setting in the “pending review” tab in the platform’s moderation tools. YouTube claims that this will reduce the number of spam / scam comments, however, with stricter filters, there is always a risk that there is also an increase in false positives.
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It’s a limited number of relatively small changes, but it’s good that YouTube is still working on improving this problem.