YouTube groups comments held by your settings and comments it suspects are spam in the Held tab. Some are labelled Likely spam. YouTube’s spam guidance explains the Held tab. They are good at one job: let a creator publish, reject, or, for some items, hide the author. They are not a history of the person, a reason log, or a temporary standing.

Creators who live only in that inbox make the next decision from the comment on screen. That is enough when the comment is obviously spam. It is a thin basis when the same account has been around for months, or when the held line only makes sense against a thread on another video.

How to find held comments

In YouTube Studio on the web, open the Community area and choose Held. Labels can vary by account. This includes comments caught by your settings and YouTube’s likely-spam checks. YouTube’s guidance describes the current navigation. From a held item you can publish it, reject it, or take an account action such as hiding the user from the channel.

Channel settings can feed this queue without a third-party tool: comment settings, likely-spam checks, blocked words, and holding comments that contain links or hashtags. That is the native model working as designed. It is a comment-level filter plus a review list, not an account workflow.

What the native queue does well

Use it when you want YouTube's own judgement in one place, including comments a blocked-word list or a strict comment setting held before any connected product saw them. Publish is the right native action for a harmless held comment. Reject is the right native action when the comment should not go public and you do not need a longer record.

Hide user from channel remains a separate, un-notified account action. It does not belong on a comment that only needed a second look.

What it does not do

  • It does not keep a dated probation standing for the account.
  • It does not show that account's comments across other videos as one dossier.
  • It does not keep the reason a previous moderator, or a connected tool, held an earlier comment.
  • After you hide a user, past comments from that person stop showing on the Studio Comments page, so the queue is a poor archive of why the hide happened.
  • It does not pause a third-party tool that is still allowed to request holds.

Those absences are not defects in YouTube. They are a different model: Studio reviews comments YouTube is already holding. It does not run a creator's private policy engine.

An illustration of the review list. LitterTray Held and YouTube Studio: Held stay on separate tabs.

What The Litter Tray's Studio tab adds

The tray collects YouTube-held comments that the API makes available, including likely-spam items, in its Studio tab. It offers Publish, Delete comment, or confirmed Delete and ban user against those items, so a creator can clear Studio-held comments without maintaining a second unrelated workflow. The tab can distinguish a tray-owned hold from a hold YouTube or another moderator placed. Replies are shown as context; they are not a second action target.

Keeping a Studio-held comment hidden can put its author on probation for the configured default duration. That is an owner-led route, not YouTube's native standing. Banning from this tab still requires confirmation. The daily reject cap and confirmation still apply to removals.

The tray's own Needs review list is a different queue: rule hold proposals and manual holds waiting for the creator. Studio Held is for comments YouTube is already holding. Mixing those two jobs in one mental list is how a YouTube-held spam comment and a policy proposal get the same hurried click.

What this still does not do

  • It does not replace Studio. The native Held area remains the source of YouTube-held items.
  • It does not import the complete hidden-user list.
  • It does not post or reply as the creator.
  • It does not treat a Studio hold as proof of identity across accounts.

See YouTube Studio: Held, hold for review, and review a held comment.

Correction, 20 September 2026: Corrected the description of YouTube Studio’s Held tab: likely-spam comments are included there.