YouTube

YouTube will try to remind people to be decent human beings in the comments section

Ben Schoon | Dec 4 2020 - 8:06 am PT

In a blog post this week, YouTube has revealed some efforts to make the platform “more inclusive.” That includes showing a warning when a hateful comment is detected on a YouTube video, giving users the chance to be more “respectful.”

“Toxic” comments are all too well-known on YouTube and can be a source of stress and anxiety for creators on the platform, and cleaning up the comments section is something that can make YouTube a better place for everyone.

Now, to lessen how often those comments appear, YouTube is adding a new pop-up warning that appears when hateful or negative content is detected within a comment. The pop-up reminds users to “Keep comments respectful,” but only appears on Android devices for the time being. This pop-up won’t stop users from posting whatever they want, but it may cause some to take a second look at what they’re about to say.

In addition, we’ve also invested in technology that helps our systems better detect and remove hateful comments by taking into account the topic of the video and the context of a comment. These efforts are making an impact. Since early 2019, we’ve increased the number of daily hate speech comment removals by 46x. And in the last quarter, of the more than 1.8 million channels we terminated for violating our policies, more than 54,000 terminations were for hate speech. This is the most hate speech terminations in a single quarter and 3x more than the previous high from Q2 2019 when we updated our hate speech policy.