YouTube is cracking down on tricks that spammers use to impersonate creators

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

There has been a problem with people on the site. Earlier this year, a bunch of big creators made videos showing the hordes of bad actors who swarm their channels and reply to other commenters with fake prizes. Today, YouTube announced a few new changes in order to stem the tide.

Three new policies have been created. It will no longer be possible for channels to hide their subscriber counts. If you check a channel's subscriber count, you can verify that they are Big Name Content Creator X.

Special characters that can be used in channel names are limited. Sometimes this is used in conjunction with hidden subscriber counts. The purpose of the channels is to make them appear legitimate by using special characters. It's a good idea to call your channel "ouTube" in order to look like the official account. Reducing the number of special characters reduces the choices they have.

Earlier this year, it began testing an enhanced moderation setting. The platform's moderation tools allow all creators to change the "increase strictness" setting. There is always a chance that there will be an increase in false positives with tighter filters.

It's a small number of changes, but it's good that it's still being worked on.