YouTube will take drastic action against clickbait titles and thumbnails in the future

YouTube's new crackdown on misleading thumbnails and titles is starting in India, but could soon expand to other countries. In a blog post, Google's Indian arm explained that it wants to combat “excessive clickbait” on YouTube, as more and more videos appear in which the title and thumbnail promise things that are not. not delivered in the video itself. Google claims that, particularly at times when YouTube users are searching for temporally or thematically relevant information in videos, visitors might feel frustrated, misled, or misled. In most cases, this apparently concerns videos on political topics, which channel operators exaggerate with themes such as “breaking news”.

Google has announced that videos deemed problematic by the team behind YouTube may be removed in the future without prior warning to the operator of the channel concerned. The usual warnings, in which videos are initially disabled and the channel operator has the option to remove problematic content, are completely eliminated. So far, Google has not commented on the technical details of its new measures against clickbait headlines and thumbnails. It's not clear how to tell the difference between a misleading or sensationalist title or thumbnail and the video itself. It is also unclear which types of videos are affected or how the respective content is classified.