YouTube updates its comments section tools to fight spam, bots and abuse

In its latest blog post, YouTube gives us an update on how its fight against spam, bots and abusive language is going and introduces new and updated tools to tackle the issues more successfully. In its statement, YouTube says that those are the main concerns of today's content creators and it made them a priority.

One of the main changes is the improved spam detection in the comment section. The developer team has worked hard on improving the automated spam detection and was able to get rid of 1.1 billion spam comments in the first half of this year. But spammers adapt and that's why YouTube is using machine-learning models that adapt and tackle them more efficiently. The same goes for automated detection in the live chat section during live streams.

As far as offensive comments from actual human users are concerned, YouTube is introducing a removal warning and timeouts. The system will warn users when their comments go against community guidelines and remove their comments and if the same user continues to leave abusive comments, they will receive a 24-hour ban. Internal testing shows that those systems in place reduce repeat offenders.

Another small, but important change concerns creators. Now the system will give a rough estimate on when a newly uploaded video will finish processing and be available in full resolution, be it 1080p, 2160p or 4320p.

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