YouTube Is Making It Harder to Impersonate Popular Channels
YouTube is making it easier for publishers to deal with spammy or abusive comments on their videos while simultaneously addressing concerns about scammers masquerading as established channels.
"We know that comment and identity abuse-related spam is top of mind for the YouTube community," the company says(Opens in a new window), "so today we’re sharing several updates that will help to better protect our viewers and creators from comment spam, as well as make it harder to impersonate creators."
YouTube's response to questionable comments is the addition of a new "Increase strictness" option in the "Held for review" tab in YouTube Studio. This setting "will use a stricter threshold when detecting potentially inappropriate content in comments across your channel."
The other problem—people impersonating established channels—will be addressed with two updates. The first is a restriction on "the type and/or frequency of special characters in channel names" that would prevent new users from naming their channel "”¥ouⓉube✅(Opens in a new window)", for example.
The second update won't introduce new features—it will actually take one away. YouTube says it's going to remove the ability for YouTube channels to hide their subscriber counts(Opens in a new window) on July 29.
The company says it's "seen bad actors hide their channels’ subscriber counts to impersonate larger, more prominent channels on YouTube—they pretend to be other creators in comments, then lure people to their impersonating channel page." Now those scammers won't be able to do that.
YouTube says it's going to keep an eye on the response to these changes and "keep you posted on our ongoing efforts to continue reducing impersonation and spam (in comments and beyond)
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