Racial justice, equity and product inclusion: How we’re prioritizing safety for our creators and artists

Ensuring creators are safe on YouTube

Over the past few years, we spent time talking with historically underrepresented creators about safety, and one of their key concerns was the rise in comments they saw across social platforms that were hurtful and even hateful. These creators valued YouTube’s commitment to remove any content that violates our Community Guidelines , but they also asked that we introduce updates that would make it possible to easily hide comments that are offensive to them personally.

In response to their feedback, our teams continue to invest in system improvements while also launching new features designed to help creators more easily moderate their comments. Here’s a look at some of that important progress.

● Creators have a new, optional setting that will catch even more potentially inappropriate or spam comments by selecting “Increase Strictness” in their comment settings. These comments are held for review in YouTube Studio, where creators can choose to approve, remove or report them.

● We also made an update to YouTube Studio so that comments that may be considered more hurtful than others are now placed in a separate, hidden section at the bottom of the held for review tab. This way, creators can choose to ignore them completely and leave them unreviewed if they prefer.

● Finally, we started rolling out Channel Guidelines , which allows creators to clearly communicate what is and is not ok in their comments section.

In addition to these updates, over the past few months, we’ve worked to deeply understand how we can offer more support to creators when they experience unwanted behavior. In a recent survey , we learned that while 95 percent of creators experienced unwanted behavior across multiple social platforms, only 50 percent said they had access to resources or the necessary support to handle these interactions.

So in collaboration with creators and third-party experts like ConnectSafely , The Family Online Safety Institute and the National Cybersecurity Alliance , we collected in depth information and tips on topics like how to stay safe when starting out as a new creator, what to do as your channels are growing and how to navigate experiencing things like bullying, trolling, account hijacking and more. Creators can now access all this information in our new Creator Safety Center , which is launching today.