Any platform that has active comment sections and other forum based mechanisms that people can use to talk to one another will inevitably end up suffering from spam in some way, shape or form. YouTube is no exception to this, and in many ways YouTube is the kind of platform where spam ends up becoming too great of a problem to solve.
However, the video streaming platform has been hard at work trying to find a way to ensure that people can have a good enough experience in its comment sections, and according to a recent transparency report the platform has removed over 1.8 million channels that were known to post spam comments on a more or less regular basis. Well over half a billion comments were removed in a similar manner as well, so it’s pretty clear that YouTube is trying to take this problem as seriously as possible.
A video recently released on the Creator Insider channel discussed the difficult that YouTube often faces in this regard. Not only is there no one size fits all solution to the problem at hand, it should also be noted that spammers often come up with new and unique ways in which they can get their message across. This means that the people who have been charged with trying to reduce occurrences of spam have to keep up with these changes as well.
Photo: SOPA Images via Getty Images
The video also addressed new types of spam that have arisen recently. One is a phishing scam which essentially tries to entice you into clicking on some kind of link and make you fill out a form with all of your data on it. This would result in a malicious actor acquiring all of your login credentials so you should always be careful when you see a comment that is asking you to fill something out for it.
Impersonation is often used during these scams as using the face of a well known personality is something that can make it more likely that users would give up their information without a fuss. YouTube is trying to fix this by increasing protection around channel names and how they can be identified, something that would probably decrease the chances that a user would fall for any type of scam like this in the first place.
All in all it does seem like YouTube is doing all that it can to decrease the occurrences of spam on its platform. This is something that can really adversely impact most creators so it makes sense that the platform would want to make it a thing of the past and will strive to make this happen.
Read next: YouTube's AI Will Soon Start Adding Video Chapters In Description Automatically
However, the video streaming platform has been hard at work trying to find a way to ensure that people can have a good enough experience in its comment sections, and according to a recent transparency report the platform has removed over 1.8 million channels that were known to post spam comments on a more or less regular basis. Well over half a billion comments were removed in a similar manner as well, so it’s pretty clear that YouTube is trying to take this problem as seriously as possible.
A video recently released on the Creator Insider channel discussed the difficult that YouTube often faces in this regard. Not only is there no one size fits all solution to the problem at hand, it should also be noted that spammers often come up with new and unique ways in which they can get their message across. This means that the people who have been charged with trying to reduce occurrences of spam have to keep up with these changes as well.
Photo: SOPA Images via Getty Images
The video also addressed new types of spam that have arisen recently. One is a phishing scam which essentially tries to entice you into clicking on some kind of link and make you fill out a form with all of your data on it. This would result in a malicious actor acquiring all of your login credentials so you should always be careful when you see a comment that is asking you to fill something out for it.
Impersonation is often used during these scams as using the face of a well known personality is something that can make it more likely that users would give up their information without a fuss. YouTube is trying to fix this by increasing protection around channel names and how they can be identified, something that would probably decrease the chances that a user would fall for any type of scam like this in the first place.
All in all it does seem like YouTube is doing all that it can to decrease the occurrences of spam on its platform. This is something that can really adversely impact most creators so it makes sense that the platform would want to make it a thing of the past and will strive to make this happen.
Read next: YouTube's AI Will Soon Start Adding Video Chapters In Description Automatically
