YouTube Wants To Battle Spam And Impostors, By Disabling Hidden Subscribers Counts

Once someone is given the permission to do something, there will be the time when that person, or someone else, will abuse that permission.

The same happens on the internet. Since the very first time the comments feature was introduced as a way to communicate between the communities and increase engagements, people started abusing the system by spamming. And making things worse, people on the internet can hide behind their screens, allowing them to easily impersonate others.

YouTube is the largest online streaming platform, and for more than many years, it has its own share of problems.

And its problems include dealing with spammers and also impersonators.

While these problems aren't new for the Google-owned platform, but the company, and just about anyone else on the web, know that the problems are getting worse and worse.

Thanks to people having the ability to alter their locations and change their IP addresses, and through the ways they can prevent Google from properly tracking them, some spammers and impersonators are simply getting better and better.

To battle these people, YouTube is making a few changes.

And the most notable, is by disabling the hidden subscribers counts feature.

The feature allows YouTube channels to hide the number of subscribers. More than often, some creators find this feature valuable, such as those who are starting and don't want to be judged by their subscriber count.

By hiding the subscribers count, it won't be publicly visible to others on YouTube. Only the creators can see their subscribers counts by accessing their accounts on YouTube Studio.

However, it's often used to impersonate channels, YouTube said.

As part of a more significant effort to fight spammers and creator impersonation across the platform, YouTube has stopped allowing channels to hide the number of subscribers they have.

YouTube believes this decision can make the community safer, though it’s sure to upset creators who weren’t abusing the option to hide subscribers.

Besides disabling the hidden subscribers count, YouTube is also strengthening its auto-moderation capabilities, and limiting creators' ability in using special characters in channel names.

The strengthened moderation is to automatically hold comments for moderation, before they go live for all people to see.

This update is meant to give creators the option to increase the strictness.

Making comment moderation more strict should increase detection settings for potentially inappropriate comments and spam.

Creators can increase the strictness by signing into Creator Studio, and select ‘Settings’, and then Community, then Defaults.

There, they can check the box labeled ‘hold potentially inappropriate comments for review,’ then select ‘increase strictness.’

When this setting is turned on, whatever the system considers spam and solicitations will automatically fill the ‘held for review’ tab.

From there, channels can either delete the comment or post it publicly.

And for last, limiting special characters is meant to prevent malicious actors to impersonate established channels.

For more than often, impostors could use special characters to make it seem that their channels' name is the legitimate one.

Spam accounts have been known to copy the name of whoever they’re trying to pretend to be, but subtly (or not very subtly) change one or two characters. At first glance, a fake channel might look like the real thing.

It's the use of special characters that have long allowed impostors to hide in plain sight.

Basically, YouTube doesn’t want people spelling things out in all special characters, like “¥ouⓉube” as a way to impersonate YouTube, for example.

To thwart impersonation attempts, YouTube is reducing the character set creators can choose from when updating their name.