YouTube has announced some new tools aimed at creators, with the aim of limiting the amount of spam comments that appear below videos, as well as stopping popular channels from being impersonated for nefarious means.

Starting with the new comments tool, creators will be able to set different levels of protection in terms of holding potentially inappropriate comments.

“If you want an even higher level of protection, turn on Increase strictness to hold more potentially inappropriate comments under the ‘Held for review’ tab,” a YouTube support page notes.

“Choosing to turn on this setting will use a stricter threshold when detecting potentially inappropriate content in comments across your channel,” it adds.

Shifting to the channel impersonations and starting 29th July, channels will no longer be able to hide their subscriber counts. According to the platform, hiding counts is a tactic that ne’er-do-wells like to do in order to masquerade as larger and more established channels.

YouTube adds that these impersonators like to pose as larger channels and make comments on other videos in order to attract traffic to their fake channel.

While the platform acknowledges that this decision may impact smaller creators, who prefer to hide their subscriber counts as they look to build their following, the choice to remove this ability is a necessary evil in its view.

The other small change added to the mix in order to limit channel impersonations is allowing a specific character set when changing channel names, which is also said to be a tactic employed by copycats and fakes.

With previous decisions taken by YouTube proving divisive, this one looks to be for the better of the entire community.

[Image – Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash]