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Spam Detection for YouTube Comments using ML

Abstract In today’s world, online social media sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter are very popular. People turn to social
media for interacting with other people, gaining knowledge, sharing ideas, for entertainment and staying informed about the
events happening in the rest of the world. Among these sites, YouTube has emerged as the most popular website for sharing
and viewing video content. Due to its popularity, it became a platform for spammers to distribute spam through the comments
on YouTube. This has become a concern because spam can lead to phishing attack which the target can be any user that clicks
any malicious link. YouTube themselves have tackled this issue with very limited methods which revolve around blocking
comments that contain links. Such methods have proven to be extremely ineffective as Spammers have found ways to bypass
such heuristics. Automatic comment spam filtering on YouTube is a challenge since the messages are very short with slangs,
symbols and abbreviations. We attempt to detect such comments by applying conventional machine learning algorithm such as
Naïve Bayes. The data is collected from YouTube Spam dataset by using Naïve Bayes.

Index Terms— Classification Model, Machine Learning, Spam Filtering, YouTube Comments

users use this as an opportunity to share promotional

content which is known as Spam.
I. INTRODUCTION1 Spam comments consists of information that is
irrelevant to the context of the uploaded video. Automated

Y OUTUBE is an online video platform owned by
Google. It is a video sharing website that was
launched in the year 2005. Now it is the 2 nd most visited
website in the world. About 300 hours of video are
uploaded to YouTube every minute. Almost 5 billion
videos are watched on YouTube every single day. 37% of
all mobile internet traffic belongs to YouTube. In 2014,
the user “PewDiePie”, owner of the most subscribed
channel on YouTube (nearly 40 million subscribers),
disabled comments on his videos, claiming most of the
comments are mainly spam and there is no tool to deal
with them [1].
The users of YouTube are known as channels.
YouTube allows channels to upload, rate, share, add to
favorites, report, comment on videos, and subscribe to
other users. Among many features of YouTube, one of the
features is the commenting system on YouTube videos
which allows users to comment on the videos. The
comments represent opinions of the users which maybe
praising the owner of the video or they maybe expressing
displeasure towards the video or the video contributor.
Due to this commenting system in YouTube, malicious
1
This paragraph of the first footnote will contain the date on which you
submitted your paper for review. It will also contain support information,
including sponsor and financial support acknowledgment. For example,
“This work was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Commerce
under Grant BS123456”.
The next few paragraphs should contain the authors’ current
affiliations, including current address and e-mail. For example, F. A.
Author is with the National Institute of Standards and Technology,
Boulder, CO 80305 USA (e-mail: author@ boulder.nist.gov).
S. B. Author, Jr., was with Rice University, Houston, TX 77005 USA.
He is now with the Department of Physics, Colorado State University, Fort
Collins, CO 80523 USA (e-mail: author@lamar.colostate.edu).
T. C. Author is with the Electrical Engineering Department, University
of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309 USA, on leave from the National
Research Institute for Metals, Tsukuba, Japan (e-mail: author@nrim.go.jp).
bots disguised as a user often contribute to spam. These
irrelevant or unsolicited messages are aimed to attack
users by luring them into clicking links to view malicious
sites containing malware, phishing and scams. The
spammer`s intention is to spread malware through the
comment section, which will exploit vulnerabilities in the
user’s machines. Another intention is seizing money
transactions and hijacking credit card and banking
information. Spammer also tends to ruin the content of
web pages.
There are many techniques for automatic spam
filtering which have degraded performance when dealing
with YouTube’s comments. This is due to the fact that
such messages are usually very short and rife with idioms,
slangs, symbols, emoticons, and abbreviations which make
even tokenization a challenging task.
I.1 Types of
[1] “Improving Email Spam Detection Using Content Based Feature
Engineering Approach,” 2016.
[2] Y. Yusof and O. H. Sadoon, “Detecting Video Spammers In Youtube
Social Media,” no. 082, pp. 228–234, 2017.
[3] T. Stone, “Parameterization of Na ¨ ıve Bayes for Spam Filtering,”
2003.
[4] R. Chowdury, N. M. Adnan, G. A. N. Mahmud, and R. M. Rahman,
“A Data Mining Based Spam Detection System for YouTube,” pp.
373–378, 2013.
[5] S. Raschka, “Introduction and Theory,” pp. 1–20, 2014.
[6] P. Langley, W. Iba, and K. Thompson, “An analysis of Bayesian
classifiers,” Aaai, 1992, vol. 90, pp. 223–228
[7] A. McCallum and K. Nigam, “A comparison of event models for
Naive Bayes text classification,” AAAI-98 Workshop on Learning
for Text Categorization, 1998, pp. 41–48.