YouTube has always had trolls and haters in the comments. But spammers and scammers have really
taken it to a whole new level. You need to see what's going on so that you can protect yourself.
I'm the producer for the Noelle Randall YouTube channel which is wildly successful right now.
And it's being hit really hard with spammers and scammers that are trying to take money
from viewers. So, I'm going to show you what's happening, what you can do about it and then
I'm going to address some changes that I think YouTube needs to make in order to make youtube
safer for everybody. Let's dive into the comments and see what people are doing this. First example
is you'll see people post the same comment multiple times. So, you see this person Jan
posted the same comment twice and it's really really detailed. It's clearly a marketing message
and it's a repeat. And you might think, "Oh, maybe they just accidentally pasted it twice."
But what if you see the same exact comment but coming from different people? Take a look at
this. We've got Jen and then this Johannes, the complete different person, different account
posting the exact same content. And you can tell. I've got 5 of the same comments on my screen here.
This is all spam. So, here are a couple more examples. They look like real people or real
accounts. But these are actually fake accounts set up to scam people. See Shanda and Marietta. Both
the exact same comment right there. Or here Thomas and Robert both the exact same comment. Now, it's
actually easy to detect multiple comments if it's on the same episode. But what if somebody comes to
your channel and posts across different episodes? See, Diego made this comment here on the video how
to create value and make money fast. And then you see the exact same comment on a different video.
The number one thing to do to get rich. You'll even find fake conversations. Take a look at this.
So, perhaps the original question was a real comment. You know, "How long will it take to
freeze the account?" Somebody responds, "I believe it takes up to 30 days." I'm guessing that those 2
might be legit comments, real people. Then the next one, Sarah lists the phone number would
assist you. And then Isaac says, "I also got help from Gina. You can text her and see your
good works." And then Shawna, "Wow!" The reason that I know that these are spam is I found them
repeated in multiple places in that exact same sequence. So, I want to show you 2 different
ways. You can find comments, you can go to an individual video or look at comments for the
whole channel. So, let's first take a look at the video that just launched today. So,
if you come over here to comments, you'll just see the comments for this video. So, she has a very
engaged channel as you can see. Already just in the first few hours, she's got a lot of comments.
Oh, right there, look. So, this lady Chocolate Siren likes the video. She comments and says
something about it. But then look at this. Oh, this is so terrible. This is not Noelle. This
is a fake account. Somebody created an account called it Noelle Randall and she says, "Reach me
on whatsapp now." And then in the next comment, there's a phone number. Oh, this is so scammy. So,
I'm definitely going to hide her from the channel. You can also do what's called a report
and that sends data to YouTube. I hope. I've reported so much because I really want YouTube
to fix this. Here's another one responding to Nathan King. Same comments they want that
phone number. So, I'm going to hide user from the channel on both those. And I'm going to show you
what that does in just a minute. You can just come in here and remove it which just deletes a comment
or if you report it, I'll show you this message that pops up it says, "Thanks! We received your
report. If we find this content to be in violation of our community guidelines, we will remove
it." My hope is that they'll see so much spam reports coming in that they'll fix their system
to eliminate the spam. The feature that gives me the best control is when I come in here and I hide
the user from the channel. So, this way, you're going video by video and looking at the comments
related to one specific video. And this can be important for newly launched videos. But what
about all the history of videos on your channel? What if people go and comment on those? Well,
if we go back to the channel dashboard and then we click on comments, now we're looking at comments
all across the entire channel. And typically what I look for is replies to comments because they're
trying to get a reaction of people that are commenting. Oh and I love that I'm not seeing any
comments yet. That means that some of the filters I've set up are working. Oh, and I love what
I'm seeing here. So, this is some there has been some comments that have been removed already. And
there's people warning each other saying, "That wasn't the real Noelle. These are spammers." Ah,
but here's another one. And I mean, obviously, it looks like spam. I hope this wouldn't trick you.
But Noelle's reported that some people have been tricked and they've given them their money.
Okay. So, I'll hide that user now you have to know. I've done this before. I've already
hidden these users from the channel. So, why are they able to still come in and do this? Somehow
and probably with programs or robots, they're creating new accounts every single day. So,
they're creating fake accounts and they're naming them after the person that they're trying to
scam. So, that they can trick their viewers to think that the owner of the channel is actually
responding to them and wants to reach out to them. So, here's another example. Latoya enjoyed the
video. She made a comment and supposedly Noelle writes back. "Hey, Whatsapp me with this number."
And look at this one. Lejeune commented, "I'm so glad I came across your channel."
And then Noelle says, "I appreciate your comment." Alright. Now, I want to show you how many users
I have blocked from this channel. How many fake Noelle accounts I blocked from this channel. So,
you come down here to settings. You click on community and there's this section right here
called hidden users. There are a lot that we have blocked. Let's go through and count all
the ones that are named Noelle. So, there's one right off the bat there. two, three, four, five.
There's number six, seven, eight. There's 9, 10, 11, 12. There's number 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19,
20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32. last time I counted there was only 14. And
I've been hard at work at blocking more of these. So, now we're up to 32 fake Noelle accounts. This
is out of hand. So, blocking accounts will work. People from that account can no longer comment
on your channel but that doesn't prevent them from creating a new account. So, you can also do
something else. Come back in here to settings. Go to community and if you scroll down even further.
There's a section here called blocked words. Okay, any words like bitcoin, whatsapp, golden survey,
leomax, crypto, mr moore, these are all things that we've seen commonly in the spam comments. I
just want to give you an example of the different types of words that we're filtering out. And we
don't allow comments that include these words. So, we put in different variations of the word
whatsapp. We've put an ampersand, pp, there. We've put in 4 periods in a row. The phrase "text me on,
dm. Info and assistance, for more options, advice and options." So, we're adding more and more of
these filters over time. I've even put in single digits followed by a period. And unfortunately,
there's going to be some legit comments that get filtered out. But we really have cut down
on the amount of spam that's getting through or the length of time that it sits there. Now,
when you set up filters like this, you can come to this held for review section. And all the
comments that were flagged and haven't been shown to the public, you can go through here and see if
there's any legit comments if you want to make them live for the public. And unfortunately,
as I look at this top list right here, there are quite a few legit comments that I see in here that
unfortunately are getting filtered and they're not able to participate because of what these spammers
have done. Now, just this last week, Noelle has made posts. She's now including little comments
in her videos. And we've started to respond in the comments warning people of these scammers.
And what's cool is Noelle's tribe is starting to help out as well. So, check this out. Tamika says,
"That's a scam. Not the real Noelle. They do this in all her videos." So, the community
is really coming together to help people not get scammed. So, here are a few ideas that I believe
YouTube needs to make and give us more control over the comments so that we can prevent stuff
like this from even happening. The first thing is brand new accounts on YouTube should not be
able to make comments or should not be able to make replies. Or at least on our settings,
we should be able to turn that feature on and off if we want brand new people
to be able to comment on our channel. The next suggestion that I have for YouTube to include
is a way to prevent comments from people with the same username or even similar usernames. It
just makes sense those are obvious spammers that want to hijack that traffic. Also, there should be
settings to filter out certain characters because there's a lot of spammy characters when they put
long lines of periods or exclamation points or colons for some reason. And they need to fix that
feature when you go into exclude words, as soon as you put a comma, it finishes it. So, you can't
exclude commas and spammers know this. Another one that should be pretty simple is identical
comments. If people are just copying pasting comments from channel to channel from video to
video, that's obviously spam. They're not really engaging and we should just eliminate that. Now,
this final suggestion is one that I really love and i've seen it on other websites. It's an id
score. So, if you're a user on youtube and you really interact, you really watch videos, you
have a real account, maybe you even upload videos to your account, you'll have a score that shows
that you're legit. But if a brand new account is set up, and there's not many factors saying that
this is a legit person or a legit account, then your score would be lower. And if I went into my
account and said, "I only want to get comments from people that have a score of 70 and above
or 50 and above." I would love to be able to have that control. The reason Noelle's channel
is getting so much spam is because it's wildly successful. It's the fastest-growing channel
that I produce. Now, Noelle and I filmed another episode. I'll link to it right here where we
both go behind the curtains and show you exactly what we've done to achieve these amazing results.