YouTube has been having a hard time with spammers lately. Earlier this year, a bunch of great 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. YouTube has been responding to these complaints and today announced a few new changes to try to stem the tide.
There are three new policies. First, channels will no longer be able to hide their subscriber count, a move often used by spammers to help camouflage themselves. This is because checking the number of subscribers to a channel is a quick way to verify who they claim to be (also known as Big Name Content Creator X).
Second, YouTube limits the type and frequency of special characters that can be used in channel names. This is another common spam tactic, which is sometimes used in coordination with the number of hidden subscribers. Basically, spam senders try to make channels look legitimate by using special characters to form familiar names. For example, by calling your channel “¥ ouⓉube” to try to mimic the official YouTube account. Reducing the frequency of special characters reduces the options they have for doing so.
Third, YouTube is expanding access to improved comment moderation settings that it began testing earlier this year. The company now says that all creators can change the “increase strict” settings in the “Retained for Review” tab of the platform’s moderation tools. YouTube says this will reduce the number of spam / scam comments, although with stricter filters, there is always the risk that there will also be an increase in false positives.
These are a small number of relatively small changes, but it’s good that YouTube is still working to improve this issue.