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Anyone who’s ventured a few inches south of YouTube’s video player can attest to what a wasteland the comment section is. Amid the stale jokes and thinly veiled hate speech is another blight on the landscape: spam comments.

These spammers, who tend to swarm popular and finance-focused channels like plagues of locusts, hawking vague entrepreneurial endeavors or hot singles in yourarea, encourage viewers to reach out to them on WhatsApp, Telegram, or another non-YouTube chat platform.

For a long time, they’ve seemed an unavoidable part of the YouTube experience. But users are no longer forced to impotently scroll past these pests. YouTube and some frustrated creators have finally developed tools to exterminate these spam comments with prejudice.

Crypto content brings them out in droves.Credit: Screenshot: YouTube

Spotting the YouTube comment spammers

YouTube spammers don’t do a great job of disguising themselves like phishers or other savvy scammers. As their entire con hinges on getting just one credulous rube to click a malicious link or share vital data, it makes more sense to cast a wide but low-effort net and hope for the best.

Their usernames are part of the scam, so instead of the sort of auto-generated jumble of letters and numbers you might see on a classic bot account, YouTube comment spammers have names like “Contact >> Money_Business_Idea
The spam comment itself is usually busting with toxic positivity, the spammer role-playing a grateful individual attesting to some unnamed person or platform’s financial powers or technical services.

YouTube’s solution

After years of complaints from creators and users, YouTube added spam-squashing features to their comment section. When you find a spam comment you want to report, click the kebab menu icon (three dots in a vertical line) at the far right of the comment. Next, click the “report” button with a flag icon.

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Credit: Screenshot: YouTube

A pop-up will open asking your reason for reporting the comment. Click the bubble next to “unwanted commercial content or spam” and finish by clicking the report button at the bottom of the pop-up.

Credit: Screenshot: YouTube

This will remove the comment from your screen.

Block them outright

There’s another YouTube-approved method to consider that removes not just one annoying spam comment, but all those created by an individual spam account: blocking. First, click on the offender’s account. Then click the “about” section on the top right side of the profile page that opens up. You’ll see a flag icon at the bottom of a menu on the right. Click that. Select “block user” and, finally, “submit.”

Credit: Screenshot: YouTube

This will prevent the account from leaving comments on any of your videos and remove all past comments they’ve left on your content.

Download and mass delete

Credit: Screenshot: Spammer Purge

For those with larger spam comment infestations to clear out, third-party solutions may be the way to go. Popular YouTuber ThioJoe was so frustrated by YouTube’s inaction on the spam comment problem that he developed a Spammer Purge app that allows creators to clean out their comments with relative ease.

This method requires the most technical know-how, has numerous complicated steps, and requires giving account permissions to a stranger’s app, so we’d recommend it only as a last resort. If you’re still interested, you can download ThioJoe’s app from githuband follow his thorough instructions to get it operating.

TopicsCybersecuritySocial Media