YouTube has introduced a new feature that will warn users if their comments are found to be abusive. The company says it will send a notification to people whose abusive comments have been removed for violating the platform's rules.
Moreover, 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. The testing has shown that these warnings/timeouts reduce the likelihood of users leaving violative comments again, as per the company's forum post.
"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 company said.
Currently, the abusive comment detection feature is only available for English comments, but the streaming platform aims to include more languages in the future. The company says that it has been working on improving its automated detection systems and machine learning models to identify and remove spam.
It has removed over 1.1 billion spam comments in the first six months of 2022, the company claimed. Since reducing spam and abuse in comments and live chat is an ongoing task, the company said that these updates will be ongoing as they continue to adapt to new trends.