Abusive Comments on YouTube Will Now Trigger Warnings, 24-Hour Timeouts

YouTube is responding to the amount of abusive and spam comments posted on videos by introducing warnings and then timeouts for repeat offenders.

YouTube community manager Rob posted on the YouTube Help website(Opens in a new window) explaining the changes. Anyone posting a comment that violates the YouTube community guidelines(Opens in a new window) should now expect their comment to be removed, but also to receive a warning.

If that same user continues to post comments that violate the guidelines, YouTube will issue them with a timeout lasting for up to a period of 24 hours during which they can’t comment. Rob said YouTube has been testing both the warnings and timeouts and found they “reduce the likelihood of users leaving violative comments again.” Hopefully the warnings also include detail as to why a comment counts as a violation.

For now, the warnings and timeouts will only work for English comments, but YouTube is working to implement the same features for other languages “in the coming months.”

Rob says YouTube removed over 1.1 billion spammy comments during the first six months of 2022, and points to spammers changing their tactics to avoid being detected. YouTube has responded by improving its machine learning models to keep up and hopefully cut down on the amount of spam going forward.

There’s also good news for anyone sick of bots flooding live chat sessions on the platform. YouTube’s engineers have improved their live chat bot detection, so hopefully this becomes less of an issue as we head into 2023.

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