How to use moderation tools for live chat

Moderators can help hold and manage comments users leave on videos or the messages participants send during your stream’s live chat. When creators add a moderator, they can choose whether they’re a standard moderator or a managing moderator. Managing moderators have more options available to them than standard moderators.

Live chat

1. Open the YouTube app 👁 Image
   .
2. In the top-right corner, tap Search 👁 Image
   and enter the channel name to access the watch page.
3. Select your Livestream to enter the live chat.
4. Tap a message or comment, and select an action from the options that appear.
5. If you’re a managing moderator, you can tap Settings 👁 Image
   to open the admin panel and select additional moderation actions.

There are two types of moderators: a standard moderator and managing moderator. A standard moderator can:

• Go to channel: You can learn about a live chat participant before taking a moderation action by going directly to their channel.
• Remove: You can remove any inappropriate or potentially abusive or offensive content. When you delete a message, it’s permanently removed from the live chat with any replies.
• Put user in timeout: You can temporarily prevent someone from sending messages in live chat, ranging from 10 seconds up to 24 hours in the following intervals:
  • 10 seconds
  • 1 minute
  • 5 minutes
  • 10 minutes
  • 30 minutes
  • 24 hours

When you put someone in time out, they can’t send messages during the selected time period.

• Hide user from this channel: When you hide someone from the channel, their chat messages and comments will no longer be visible to other viewers. YouTube doesn't tell the person that you've hidden them.
• Review potentially inappropriate messages: You can show or hide comments or messages that have been held based on your community settings.

A managing moderator can do the above, in addition to:

• Community default: You can turn on this feature to use technology to automatically detect spam, self-promotion, gibberish, and other potentially inappropriate content in comments. Learn more here.
• Turn live chat on/off: You can turn live chat on or off at any time, even after the event has started.
• Turn live chat summary on/off: You can turn live chat summaries on or off at any time, even after the event has started. Learn more about live chat summaries.
• Participant mode: You can change participation modes in live chat by choosing subscriber only, members only, or live commentary.
• Message delay: You can limit how often each user can send a chat message by setting a time limit between messages.
• Blocked words: You can block live chat messages that contain or closely match certain words.
• Manage standard moderators or approved users: You can add and remove standard moderators or approved users.

Access Channel Activity from live chat feed:

You and moderators can access public user history from the live chat feed by clicking Channel Activity from the Menu. It will display:

• User’s public profile picture 👁 Image
  
• User’s public handle
• YouTube join date
• Number of subscribers of the user
• Public live chat messages (max 50 messages per stream)

It will also contain total counts of moderation actions taken against user in last year:

• Deleted messages
• Timeouts
• Hides

Live chat participants

In live chat, icons and colors are used to visually identify certain participants. More than 1 icon can appear next to someone’s username at a time.