YouTube plans link disabling in Shorts feature to counter scam attempts

As abuse tactics rapidly evolve, we must implement preventive measures to increase the difficulty scammers and spammers face in deceiving or defrauding users through links.

San Francisco: In order to reduce spam and scam attempts, Google-owned YouTube has announced that links in Shorts comments and Shorts descriptions will be non-clickable starting August 31.

“Starting on August 31st, 2023, links in Shorts comments, Shorts descriptions, and links in the vertical live feed will no longer be clickable– this change will roll out gradually,” the platform said on a support page on Thursday.

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“Because abuse tactics evolve quickly, we have to take preventative measures to make it harder for scammers and spammers to mislead or scam users via links.”

It also mentioned that clickable social media icons from all desktop channel banners will now no longer show.

As links are an important way for creators to share information and recommend products/brands to their communities, YouTube announced new ways to showcase important links.

“Beginning August 23rd, 2023, viewers on mobile and desktop will start seeing prominent clickable links on creators’ channel profiles near the ‘Subscribe’ button.”

The video-sharing platform further mentioned that by the end of next month, it will start introducing a safer way for creators to direct viewers from Shorts to their other YouTube content.

On Tuesday, the Google-owned platform had started testing the new ‘For You’ section which will make the channel homepage more personalised to individual viewers and also recommend a mix of different content types from that channel based on the videos they’ve already watched.