Youtube announced today that it is rolling out a new feature that will prompt commentators to reconsider their hateful and abusive comments before posting. It will also begin testing a filter that allows creators to avoid having to read some of the abusive comments on their channel that were automatically held for review. The new features are meant to address long-standing issues with the quality of comments on the YouTube platform, an issue that creators have been complaining about for years.
The company said it will also soon be conducting a survey aimed at giving creators equal opportunities, and whose data can help the company better understand how some creators are more disproportionately affected by hate and online harassment.
The new comment feature, available today, is a significant change for YouTube.
The feature appears when users are about to post something offensive in the comment section of a video and warns to "Keep comments respectful". The message also tells users to check the site's Community Guidelines if they are unsure whether a comment is appropriate.
The pop-up then prompts users to click the "Edit" button and review their comment making "Edit" the most obvious choice on the screen that appears.
However, the feature will not actually prevent a user from posting their comment. If they want to proceed, they can click the "Publish Anyway" option instead.
The idea of creating roadblocks to give users time to pause and reconsider their words and actions is something many social media platforms are doing.
For example, last year Instagram launched a feature that flagged abusive comments before they were posted. He later expanded it to include offensive captions. Without providing any data, the company said these "solicitations" were helping to reduce online bullying. Meanwhile, this year Twitter started nudging users to read the linked article in the tweets they were about to share before tweeting their reaction and prevented users from retweeting with a single click.
These intentional pauses built into social platforms are designed to prevent people from reacting to content with more emotion and anger, and instead push users to be more reflective in what they say and do. UI changes like this one take advantage of basic human psychology to work and can even prove effective in a certain percentage of cases. But platforms have been reluctant to implement such changes as they can stifle user engagement.
In the case of YouTube, the company tells ProWellTech that its systems will learn what is considered offensive based on what content is repeatedly reported by users. Over time, this AI-based system should be able to improve as technology improves in detection and the system itself is further developed.
Users on English-language Android will see the new prompts first, starting today, says Google. The implementation will be completed in the next two days. The company did not offer a time frame for feature support for other platforms and languages or even a firm commitment that such support would come in the future.
Additionally, YouTube said it will now also begin testing a feature for creators who use YouTube Studio to manage their channel.
Creators will be able to try out a new filter that will hide offensive and offensive comments that have been automatically held for review.
Today, YouTube Studio users can choose to automatically moderate potentially inappropriate comments, which they can then manually review and choose to approve, hide or report. While it's helpful to keep them, it's still often difficult for creators to deal with these comments, as online trolls can be incredibly cruel. With the filter, creators can completely avoid these potentially offensive comments.
YouTube says it will also streamline its moderation tools to streamline the review process in the future.
The changes follow a year during which YouTube was heavily criticized for not doing enough to combat hate speech and disinformation on its platform. The video platform's "warnings" system for rule violations means that videos can be removed individually, but a channel itself can remain online unless it collects enough warnings to be removed. In practice, this means that a YouTube creator could be as violent as asking for the beheading of government officials and continuing to use YouTube. (In comparison, the same threat led to a Twitter account ban.)
YouTube says it has increased the number of daily hate speech takedowns by 46 times since the beginning of 2019. And in the last quarter, of the more than 1.8 million channels closed for violations, more than 54,000 they were hate speech. This indicates a growing problem with online discourse that has likely influenced these new measures. Some argue that platforms have a responsibility to do even more, but it's a difficult balance.
In a separate move, YouTube said it will soon introduce a new poll that will ask creators to voluntarily share information about their gender, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity with YouTube. Using the data it collects, YouTube says it will be able to better examine how content from different communities is treated in search, discovery, and monetization systems.
It will also look for possible patterns of hatred, harassment and discrimination that could affect some communities more than others, the company explains. And the survey will give creators a chance to participate in other YouTube-hosted initiatives, like #YouTubeBlack or FanFest creators' gatherings, for example.
This survey will begin in 2021 and has been designed in consultation with input from civil and human rights creators and experts. YouTube states that the data collected will not be used for advertising purposes and the creators will have the option to opt out and completely delete their information at any time.
