YouTube starts giving ‘timeouts’ and 24-hour ban warnings to commenters violating community guidelines

YouTube recently launched a new feature that essentially tightens its moderation of comments posted on the platform. Users who will be found to have violated the community guidelines may face warnings of “timeouts” or 24-hour bans.

On a support page, YouTube said the warnings and temporary bans could be given to users who have had comments removed for violating its community rules. But the new feature can also work against commenters “detected” to have committed similar violations.

Google said prior testing showed that dishing out timeouts or 24-hour bans seemed to have been effective in discouraging users from leaving comments that do not align with its community guidelines.

“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,” YouTube said. But the company admitted that not all warnings and bans may be accurate as the new feature rolls out. So YouTube is letting users send feedback if they think they should not have received a warning.

For now, the feature can only detect violations in English comments. But YouTube said it is working on improving the feature to support more languages in the coming months.

Aside from the warnings and 24-hour bans, YouTube will also display “comment reminders” when its system detects that a user is about to post a potentially offensive comment. But YouTube said this is going to just encourage the user to “reflect” on what they want to say and review the platform’s community guidelines.

In the same post, YouTube highlighted some of the improvements it made in detecting spam comments and bots in live chats. The company said more than 1.1 billion spam comments were removed from videos in the first six months of 2022 through machine learning tools and automated systems.

Bots are a guaranteed nuisance on chats for livestreams, and they could easily flood live chats making it difficult for real viewers to enjoy discussions while watching an event as it happens. YouTube said it has also improved its spambot detection this year, but the company did not provide any figure on how much bot activity it thwarted with its tools.

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