Some Updates to Links on YouTube

As our teams at YouTube continue to innovate throughout 2023 and beyond, nothing is more important than our responsibility to protect our community.

Since introducing Shorts two years ago, the volume and speed of content published on YouTube has increased in fun and exciting ways. At the same time, this speed and level of engagement has made it easier for spammers and scammers to share links in Shorts comments and Shorts descriptions that harm the community – for example, clickable links that drive users to malware, phishing, or scam-related content.

While we have existing systems and policies in place to detect and remove these kinds of links, we need to take additional preventative measures to make it harder to take advantage of users via links. Simultaneously, we’re continuing to work on tools and features to help creators more safely include links in their content – more on these updates below. 

Starting on August 10, 2023, clickable social media icons from all desktop channel banners will no longer show, as they can be a source of misleading links. 

 

Starting on August 31st, 2023, links in Shorts comments, Shorts descriptions, and links in the vertical live feed will no longer be clickable - this change will roll out gradually. We don’t have any plans to make any other links unclickable. Because abuse tactics evolve quickly, we have to take preventative measures to make it harder for scammers and spammers to mislead or scam users via links.

We know that links are an important way for creators to share information and recommend products/brands to their communities, so we’re actively working on safer ways for creators to include important links in their content.

 

• Reducing impersonation across YouTube: We've recently made substantial improvements to our policies and systems that help detect and remove impersonating channels, especially those that seek to impersonate popular creators, artists, and public figures. These updates have already rolled out and we’ll continue to make them even better over time. Comparing Q1 '22 to Q1 '23, we increased the number of channels removed/terminated from YouTube due to impersonation by over 35%.
   
• More powerful comment moderation tooling: We’ve continued to improve our ‘Increase Strictness’ feature, which detects and holds potentially spammy and inappropriate comments for optional review by creators. Since making these improvements, we saw a 200% increase in comments held for review through Increased Strictness, comparing the first week of June (after the improvements) with the first week of May (before the improvements).