- The YouTube comments section continues to be a divisive part of the internet, with Google moving to police it better.
- The latest move sees a new policy coming to the fore which will penalise repeat offenders.
- To that end, if you continually post toxic comments, they will be removed and the user will be banned from posting for 24 hours.
It is often said that if you want to see the worst of humanity, head to the YouTube comments section. The past decade has proved it a divisive part of the internet where much hatred and vitriol is often shared and an area that Google (which owns YouTube) has had to address.
Efforts in that regard have proved mixed, and the latest move by Google is to enforce some stricter rules on toxic comments. To that end, the community guidelines have received an update, with timeouts for users now coming into play.
The platform adds that this new system was tested out in part and found to be effective, hence its fully-fledged rollout.
“We’re launching a new feature that warns users when we’ve detected and removed some of their comments for violating our Community Guidelines. Additionally, if a user continues to leave multiple abusive comments, they may receive a timeout and be temporarily unable to comment for up to 24 hours. Our testing has shown that these warnings/timeouts reduce the likelihood of users leaving violative comments again,” explained YouTube in an update this week.
“Currently, this notification will only be available for English comments, but we hope to bring it to more languages in the coming months,” it added.
Whether this is enough to clamp down, or indeed decrease the amount of toxic comments on YouTube remains to be seen, but we’re sure users in the community will let their opinions be known on this latest change. That said, with the dislike count still missing, perhaps YouTube will stay the course for this latest move.
“Our goal is to both protect creators from users trying to negatively impact the community via comments, as well as offer more transparency to users who may have had comments removed to policy violations and hopefully help them understand our Community Guidelines,” the platform continued.
“Of course, our systems don’t always get it right, so users who receive these warnings can give feedback to help us know if we’ve gotten it wrong,” it concluded.
[Image – Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash]
Posting toxic comments on YouTube will earn you a 24-hour timeout
It is often said that if you want to see the worst of humanity, head to the YouTube comments section. The past decade has proved it a divisive part of the internet where much hatred and vitriol is often shared and an area that Google (which owns YouTube) has had to address.
Efforts in that regard have proved mixed, and the latest move by Google is to enforce some stricter rules on toxic comments. To that end, the community guidelines have received an update, with timeouts for users now coming into play.
The platform adds that this new system was tested out in part and found to be effective, hence its fully-fledged rollout.
“We’re launching a new feature that warns users when we’ve detected and removed some of their comments for violating our Community Guidelines. Additionally, if a user continues to leave multiple abusive comments, they may receive a timeout and be temporarily unable to comment for up to 24 hours. Our testing has shown that these warnings/timeouts reduce the likelihood of users leaving violative comments again,” explained YouTube in an update this week.
“Currently, this notification will only be available for English comments, but we hope to bring it to more languages in the coming months,” it added.
Whether this is enough to clamp down, or indeed decrease the amount of toxic comments on YouTube remains to be seen, but we’re sure users in the community will let their opinions be known on this latest change. That said, with the dislike count still missing, perhaps YouTube will stay the course for this latest move.
“Our goal is to both protect creators from users trying to negatively impact the community via comments, as well as offer more transparency to users who may have had comments removed to policy violations and hopefully help them understand our Community Guidelines,” the platform continued.
“Of course, our systems don’t always get it right, so users who receive these warnings can give feedback to help us know if we’ve gotten it wrong,” it concluded.
[Image – Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash]
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Robin-Leigh Chetty
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