Aiming to reduce spam accounts and impersonators, YouTube will be removing the ability to hide subscriber count starting July 29, 2022. The platform is also launching a new increased strictness setting within its auto-moderation tools.

Despite knowing that hiding subscriber count is beneficial for small creators who are building their communities, YouTube explains that significance of the new change as follows:

‘While we’re aware that some creators find this feature valuable, as YouTube grows, we found it is often used to impersonate channels. Bad actors often lure people to their channel page by impersonating other creators in comments. And now, channels will no longer be able to hide their subscriber counts on YouTube.’

Moving on to the new increased strictness setting, it will give channel managers and creators the option to filter out junk comments. YouTube further highlights this feature as follows:

‘Turning on these settings will increase detection settings for potentially inappropriate comments and spam. With this new stronger setting, you should notice more spam and solicitations being automatically filtered under your Held for Review tab rather than making it through to your audience.‘

To further combat spam and misuse, YouTube will also be limiting the number of special characters that creators can use in their channel names. 

Learn more here.