YouTube Update to Crack Down on Spam Comments & Account Impersonators

For several years now, YouTube has had a pretty big problem when it has come to spam. No, I’m not necessarily talking about misleading videos, but more the fact that for many channels (both big and small), comment sections can sometimes get absolutely flooded by ‘people’ making posts you know for a fact aren’t legitimate. – Another issue is, of course, presented when ‘fake’ accounts get created that look to represent themselves as some kind of huge and/or well-known YouTube personality (or the channel owner) when, in fact, they’re actually entirely fake.

Why do they do this? Well, the short answer is to spam and scam. A lot of them tend to post links in the comment sections to websites which, as I’m sure many of you already know, are well worth avoiding for various reasons!

This isn’t an isolated problem either. We sadly know this ourselves as a fact as many of our Discord members have regularly got in touch with us to highlight people in our own social media comments sections with ‘clone’ accounts purporting to be us! – Put simply, it’s a problem!

Following a report via AndroidCentral, however, YouTube has announced a new update for the platform, set to release later this month, that will be looking to not only directly tackle these spam/fake user accounts, but also give content creators more tools to attempt to stop them!

YouTube Update Looks to Crack Down on Spam/Fake Accounts!

One helpful new addition will see accounts no longer being able to hide subscriber counts. A small point maybe, but by clicking on their profile, impersonators should be pretty easy to identify by the merits that they’ll probably only have a handful of subscribers (and more probably zero if they’re fake) compared to the person they’re purporting to be.

In addition, YouTube has also confirmed that channel owners will now get extra controls when it comes to spam detection including the ability to search for and automatically block/delete comments with certain key phrases and/or website links. With just a little bit of copy-paste legwork from the legitimate channel owner (following the identification of a spam/fake post), they should now be able to stop similarly garbage comments (or just key aspects of it) from appearing again in the future!

Finally, YouTube has confirmed that the ability to type special characters as an account name will now be severely restricted meaning that, as an example they give, something like ” ¥ouⓉube✅’ can no longer be used! (And yes, I see this kind of account name a lot!).

While it’s clearly doubtful this will be a magic bullet solution to solve all spamming/scamming activities on the platform, it certainly sounds good and clearly represents one of the most proactive things YouTube has done for a while. – If you would, therefore, like to learn more about the upcoming changes (set to be applied on July 29th), you can check out their official blog post via the link here!

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!