YouTube's new tools will make life hard for spammers, scammers
What's the story
As cases of comment spam and account hijacking rise, YouTube has stepped in to reign in the miscreants. The Google-owned video-sharing platform has rolled out a couple of new tools and settings to help its creators. The new features are expected to help creators control abusive and spam comments. To keep fake accounts in check, the ability to hide subscriber count has been removed.
Context
Why does this story matter?
YouTube has over two billion active users and over 50 million channels. Among these, many find pleasure in making spam or abusive comments or simply impersonating a creator. The company has decided to make life a little tougher for these people with the new tools it has given its creators. It remains to be seen how effective these new tools will be.
Spam/abuse
'Increase strictness' option will hold inappropriate comments for review
To improve the creator's ability to combat spam and abusive comments, YouTube has introduced a new moderation setting in YouTube Studio. They can select an 'increase strictness' option, which will hold inappropriate comments for a later review. It is designed to reduce spam and identify abusive comments. The option is an alternative to manually filtering comments or turning them off completely.
Impersonators
Creators won't be able to hide subscriber count from now
To deal with fake channels pretending to be real ones, YouTube has decided to get rid of the feature that lets creators hide their subscriber count. According to the company, this is a tactic used by fake accounts to attract more followers. While acknowledging that some creators prefer to keep the number hidden, YouTube said the move will keep the space safer for everyone.
Cloning
YouTube reduces special characters used while updating channel name
YouTube has taken strict offense to the growing cases of fake accounts. In order to deal with them, the company has decided to reduce the special character set that people use while updating a channel name. Bad actors use special characters to clone the official page name and escape the algorithm. This move is expected to make that practice less effective.