YouTubers are sick of comment spam, so YouTube is testing a stricter moderation system

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

There has been an increase in comments on their channels in recent weeks. The problem has been particularly acute for these high-profile creators, who often see more malicious commenters impersonate them in an attempt to scam their viewers.

There is a problem withYouTube. It just keeps getting worse with each passing day, and that's why Linus Sebastian said to start a February 1st video on his Linus Tech Tips channel.

The description for Brownlee's April 1st video says that comments on the site have been out of control for months.

It can take many forms. Major creators are concerned about all of the things that can go wrong, such as being impersonated, promising viewers something good for messaging them, and eventually scamming them.

Other comments can be less malicious but still annoying. In a March 6th video, McLoughlin discusses how his channel will get copy-pastes of genuine-looking comments, but they will be shared by users with names. To have sex with me. Do not click or tap on that profile if you see it.

There are many tools that can be used to combat comments that are not real. In the fourth quarter of 2016 alone, the company removed more than one billion comments for violating their policies, according to a statement from the company.

The systems have not been enough, and YouTube knows it. Brownlee posted Friday about a new moderation feature that will increase strictness and automatically review potentially inappropriate comments. The enhanced feature was first rolled out by the company in 2016 to hold potentially inappropriate comments for review.

This “Increase strictness” content moderation tool is a new experiment from YouTube that’s been in the works for a bit. Hoping it can make a dent in this comment spam we’ve been seeing so much lately pic.twitter.com/KVkjVCOUKZ

— Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) April 8, 2022

It sounds like YouTube is watching the issue closely. Both Sebastian and Brownlee mentioned that they can use the "YouTube Spammer Purge" tool, which allows them to filter out comments.

It's not clear if there will be a reprieve anytime soon for creators who are getting a lot of comments.

Update April 8th, 5:09PM: Added additional context from YouTube on the increase strictness feature.