YouTube's Anti-Spam Update Affects VTuber Fans in Chat

YouTube released an update on comment spam and abuse last December 14, which detailed its progress in:

• Improving spam detection in comments,
• Improving bot detection in live chat, and
• Launching a new feature warning users who are detected violating community guidelines, and imposing timeouts for up to 24 hours for those who leave multiple abusive comments.
• This update is first reflected for English comments, and YouTube hopes to roll out the update "to more languages in the coming months."

The Google-owned platform said that it has removed over 1.1 billion spam comments in the first six months of the year as a result of the improved automated detection systems.

Unfortunately, the update is affecting some chatters on VTuber streams who were wondering why they can no longer chat on YouTube.

Among the first to notice was Production Kawaii's Peony Aeria, who speculates that YouTube is shadow-banning chatters at random:

Has This Happened Before?

According to ChocoMilkTea, who frequently watches VTubers live, the timeout function was "too aggressive" for those who chat a lot without violation. She even shared her video from January documenting her experience chatting on the platform:

Advice: Stop Spamming in Chat

Indonesian AKA Virtual talent Airi Cordelia notices the issue and asks her chat to avoid spamming emojis and emotes on livechat for now:

Spam bots in chat went worse early this year. Several VTuber channels got terminated due to the sheer number of rule-breaking chats, especially chats with links to adult content. Hololive Indonesia's Kobo Kanaeru and Nijisanji's Mika Melatika were among those affected by vulgar spam bots.