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A YouTube blocked words list worth pasting

VA Vishal Arora ·

Why every channel needs a custom blocked words list

YouTube's default spam filters catch obvious profanity, but they often miss sophisticated impersonation scams, crypto bot rings, and contact harvesting bots.

A curated blocklist holds those comments for review before they appear publicly.

Two things to know before pasting anything, because most published lists ignore both.

Matching is loose. YouTube's documentation says comments "containing or closely matching" your terms may be held, which includes matches inside longer words and near-variants. A short generic term causes far more damage than expected.

Nothing is deleted. Blocked words hold comments for up to 60 days, invisible to the public unless you approve them, then remove them. So an over-broad list does not visibly break anything: it silently sends real comments to a queue you are not reading, and 60 days later they are gone.

That combination is why the right instinct here is conservative. Block phrases, which are unambiguous. Avoid single generic words, which are not.

How to add blocked words in YouTube Studio (Step-by-step)

[ YouTube Studio ] ➔ [ Settings (Gear Icon) ] ➔ [ Community ] ➔ [ Automated Filters ] ➔ [ Blocked Words Box ] ➔ Paste Terms Separated by Commas ➔ [ Save ]
  1. Open YouTube Studio (studio.youtube.com).
  2. Click Settings in the bottom-left sidebar.
  3. Click Community > Automated Filters.
  4. Scroll down to the Blocked words text box.
  5. Paste your comma-separated list of words and click Save.

Category 1: Telegram, WhatsApp & impersonator scams (Copy & paste)

These target scammers impersonating your channel to move viewers into private messaging apps. They are multi-word on purpose: whats app catches the spaced-out evasion without blocking a sentence about an app, and telegram me does not hold a comment mentioning a telegram.

One caveat if you run contests. The prize-claim phrases will hold entrants congratulating each other and viewers asking how to claim, during the exact week those comments matter. Either add them after the contest closes, which is when impersonators show up anyway, or add your regulars as approved users so their comments bypass the filters.

whatsapp, whats app, telegram, tele gram, t.me, t.me/, viber, signal app, text me on, text my assistant, reach out on, contact me on, my manager on, message me on, send a text to, congratulations you won, claim your prize, claim prize, you are the winner, official winner, prize claim

Category 2: crypto, forex & financial fraud

These target bot armies running fake investment conversations. Add them only if finance is not your subject.

Safer, because they are specific to the scam:

forex, binary options, guaranteed profit, passive income guaranteed, profit withdrawal, trading expert, trading signal, recovery agent, fund recovery, investment platform

Use with care. These appear constantly in ordinary conversation on technology, finance, gaming and news channels, and blocking them there will hold your real audience:

crypto, bitcoin, btc, ethereum, eth, usdt, binance, financial advisor, trade with

Category 3: free subscribers, view bots & channel growth spam

These terms filter spam accounts promoting illicit channel boosting services:

free subs, sub4sub, sub 4 sub, free subscribers, buy views, boost channel, grow your channel fast, gain followers, viral promotion, promote on, check my channel, subscribe back, please sub to me

Category 4: common obfuscated spellings & leetspeak

Spammers replace letters with numbers or spaces to get past filters. Be realistic about this category: you cannot enumerate the variants faster than they can generate them, and chasing every spelling produces a list broad enough to hold ordinary comments. Aim at the phrases that are hard to disguise without making the scam unreadable, and let the link filter and the strictness setting cover the rest.

wh@tsapp, w.h.a.t.s.a.p.p, te1egram, t-e-l-e-g-r-a-m, tele_gram, w-h-a-t-s-a-p-p, t.me/+, +1 (, +44, +234, reach on tele, dm me on

Master copy-and-paste blocked words list (All categories combined)

This is the conservative version: phrases with essentially no legitimate use in a comment, safe to paste on almost any channel.

whats app, whatsapp me, wh@tsapp, w.h.a.t.s.a.p.p, telegram me, tele gram, te1egram, t.me/, text me on, text my assistant, message me on, message my manager, reach out to my manager, contact my manager, my personal assistant, send a text to, dm me on tele, hit me up on whats, congratulations you won, congratulations you have won, you are the winner, official winner, claim your prize, claim your reward, dm to claim, you have been selected as, sub4sub, sub 4 sub, free subs, free subscribers, buy views, boost your channel, grow your channel fast, subscribe back, check my channel

Notice what is not in it. No bare crypto, bitcoin, investment, signal app or +1 (, because those hold ordinary comments on plenty of channels. Add them from the category sections above only if they do not describe your own subject matter.

Safe Community engagement & lead capture with ReplyTide

While blocking spam words cleans your comment feed, you still want to encourage genuine viewer engagement and conversions.

ReplyTide lets you create authorized, high-converting keyword interactions that bypass spam risks entirely:

Audit it every few months

Open the held queue and look at what got caught. If you are approving most of it, a term is too broad, and the ones you approve tell you which. This is the only feedback loop available, because nobody complains about a comment they do not know was held.

While you are in Studio, turn on the setting that holds comments containing links. It catches most monetised spam on its own and it does not apply to you, your moderators or your approved users. That plus the strictness setting is the rest of the setup.

If you need to check whether a particular comment survived, the comment search reads the whole thread rather than the fraction your browser has loaded.

Common questions

Are blocked words case sensitive?

No. Blocking whatsapp also catches WhatsApp and WHATSAPP. What it will not reliably catch are deliberate obfuscations with inserted characters, which is why spammers use them.

Does adding blocked words delete the comments automatically?

No. Comments containing blocked words are placed in your "Held for Review" queue. They will not be visible publicly unless you manually approve them. After 60 days, unreviewed comments are permanently deleted.

Can viewers see which words are on my blocked list?

No. Your blocked words list is strictly confidential and visible only to channel owners and managers inside YouTube Studio.

Set up your first keyword reply in about five minutes. Start a 7-day trial.

Official references