New YouTube policy tries to ban “implied” threats, “malicious” insults

Enlarge / Photoshopped image of YouTube logo behind a barbed-wire fence. (credit: YouTube / Getty / Aurich Lawson)

YouTube has for a long time been used as a platform for bad actors to launch massive campaigns of targeted harassment against individuals. After years of professing an inability to act and reduce such behavior, YouTube is finally updating its policies to reflect the ways bad actors actually tend to behave, and the site is promising to increase consequences against harassers.

Content that "maliciously insults" someone based on their membership in a legally protected class, such as race, gender, or sexual orientation, is now against the rules, YouTube said in a blog post today. "Veiled or implied" threats, of the sort that tend to rile up an online mob to go harass someone, are also now prohibited.

"Something we've heard from our creators is that harassment sometimes takes the shape of a pattern of repeated behavior across multiple videos or comments," YouTube added, catching up to what targets of coordinated online abuse campaigns have been saying for the better part of a decade. As such, the pattern of behavior will now be something the platform takes into account.

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