YouTube Tests New Harsher Measures for Preventing Spam in Comments

If you want to visit the almost unmoderated piece of what the Internet used to be, visit any popular video on YouTube. Freedom of speech here reaches the heights (or depths) of real wildness. To prevent spam and other destructive comments, YouTube adds more possibilities for content creators to handle their feedback. 

To help creators handle it, YouTube rolls out the new “Increase strictness” mode. It is available in the “Comments and ratings” section. Under the familiar “Hold the potentially inappropriate comments to review” section, there is a new option named “Increase strictness”. So far, it is marked as “Experiment”. 

With this option on, the marked comments are not published immediately. The administrator of the channel needs to review them. Those found inappropriate will be deleted, the others are approved.

How does this increased strictness work? There was no clear explanation so far. But it’s logical to suggest that YouTube rates the chance any particular comment is “potentially inappropriate”, and while the regular option requires a certain high probability level, the “Increase strictness” option lowers it. Of course, this also includes a variety of methods used for rating comments, and these methods are also constantly being improved.

Marques Brownlee was among the first creators who received the new feature in the experimental mode. As he posted a tweet about it, he had not yet tried this feature in work. The response of the readers was quite skeptical about the potential victory over spam and abusive content. Yet we are to see it yet. 

Do you also find it useful to further restrict potentially abusive or inappropriate comments on YouTube? Safer environment, or freedom of speech? Do you think Google will find the perfect balance between the two? Let us know what you think in the comments!