You will be warned if you are about to post an offensive comment on an YouTube video

In an attempt to weed out offensive comments on videos, YouTube is going to ask people - “Is this something you really want to share?” - before they post something that might be offensive. With this. Facebook is following the footsteps of other social media companies that have been trying to clamp down on bullying and abuse on their platforms.

YouTube is launching a new product feature that is going to warn people if they are about to post a comment that might be offensive to others giving them a chance to reflect before posting, the video streaming platform explained in a blog post.

However, this new tool is not going to actually stop you from posting any comment. Also, the prompt to ‘rethink’ is going to appear only for those posts that YouTube might consider offensive and this is based on content that has been repeatedly reported on the platform. Once the prompt shows up, users can still go ahead and post the comment exactly as they had planned or can take some time to edit it.

Also Read: Twitter expands hate speech rules to include race, ethnicity

For the creators, the company is rolling out better content filtering systems in YouTube Studio, the place where creators manage their channels. At the YouTube studio there is a new filter in place that will seek out inappropriate and offensive comments that will be automatically flagged and and held for review and removed from the queue so as people don’t have to read them.

This feature is going to roll out on Android first and be available in English before it is made available for other languages.

Also Read: YouTube bans more white supremacist channels for hate speech

YouTube has been trying to clean its platform off offensive and abusive messages and has been working on this for a while now. The platform used automatic filtering to remove daily hate speech comments 46 times more since early 2019 than before, according to their reports.

For offensive videos, YouTube claims that terminated 1.8 million channels in the last quarter and more than 54,000 of them were due to hate speech.