YouTube takes new measures to fight spammy, abusive comments

Video sharing platform YouTube announced on Tuesday that it will now warn users if they violate its platform rules by leaving spammy and abusive comments under videos, and ban them from commenting for up to 24 hours if they continue to do so.

‘’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,’’ YouTube said in a forum post. ‘’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.’’

In addition to the new feature, the Google-owned company also announced that it has removed more than 1.1 billion spammy comments in the first half of this year alone, and that it has been working on strengthening its automated detection and machine learning technologies to be able to detect and remove them in a more effective way.

‘’As spammers change their tactics, our machine learning models are continuously improving to better detect the new types of spam,’’ the company said.

Additionally, it also said that it has improved its spambot detection systems in order to prevent bots from joining and negatively affecting live streams on the platform.