YouTube is Putting Trolls in “Timeout”

If you’re one of the millions of online trolls who get a kick out of leaving toxic comments on YouTube videos that violate the company’s community guidelines – your day just got a whole lot worse.

According to a story reported by TechCrunch, YouTube will begin putting users in “Timeout” if their toxic and harmful comments violate the brands community guidelines.  

If YouTube detects and deletes a comment deemed to violate their community standards, they will give the user a slap on the wrist by notifying them they violated their guidelines. Don’t let them catch you doing it again though – this will result in a 24-hour ban where you’ll forced think about what you’ve done. During this temporary ban you’ll be unable to leave further comments until your “timeout” has been lifted. Users will be allowed to notify YouTube if they think their ban is unjust – however the company didn’t say whether or not stating your case would have any influence on if the timeout would be removed or not.

YouTube has previously tested this new featured aimed to keep pesky trolls out of your YouTube channels, and they claim it was effective. “Our testing has shown that these warnings/timeouts reduce the likelihood of users leaving violative comments again,” the company noted in a blog post.

YouTube is a treasure trove of toxicity when it comes to comments sections. Comments are famously and typically spammed with fake giveaways, crypto, or just awful and vile comments only a mean soul behind the safety of a keyboard can produce.  In an effort to combat this, YouTube said its “improving our automated detection systems and machine learning models to identify and remove spam.” 

The company released data stating that over 1.1 billion spam comments were removed in the first half of 2022, and that their machine learning models are continuously learning and improving as spammers and trolls change their methods of posting in comment sections.

Story via Engadget