Let me explain the content of all 5 videos on my 11 year + old channel.
1) a video of a squirrel that carried half a loaf of French bread along a fence and jumped into a tree. He dropped the bread during the jump but somehow managed to one hand/paw catch the bread and save it.
2) a friend of mine who was unable to ride a spring horse on a playground.
3)my son reacting to a scene from the movie hot rod(cool beans) this was a private video.
4) music video of my own music. No samples or other copyrighted material contained. 5) another music video also with no copyrighted material.
I submitted a request to the YouTube forum but I suspect that is a black hole where support requests go to die.
I’m not really all that upset and I have all the videos that are on the channel locally but the 1 strike you are banned seems awfully extreme. The fact that I wasn’t told that something was flagged or given any sort of heads up is really what bothers me. How can I get YouTubes attention?
I've had this discussion with Googlers here before and this is apparently what they actually believe.
* They're content with algorithmic approaches to spam prevention and other moderation that results in numerous false positives and don't see the problem with that.
* They think their support channels are more than adequate.
* They think their bans result solely in bad actors being harmed and don't realize that shady businesses that actually do spam have endless fake companies at their disposal to keep on trucking.
youtube "Hero" is a dumpster fire. Someone mass banned my google dev account for one app that I had for around 8 years as "impersonating or trying to impersonate" whatever that means.
I applied for review and got an automated review that even all related accounts will be banned and they went ahead and banned a related play dev account.
Weird thing is that I have a google cloud account with $120k yearly spend and my startup on it. Time to hedge my bets and move off google cloud.
There is a wave of people copying other people's music, claiming as their own and then sending claims to the original video.
Maybe since your channel is small, Youtube decided to just ban. I've seen it happened with people who tried to pirate music more than once.
I don't post any music at all on Youtube. It all goes trough a third-party service that posts on my behalf and on streaming services.
I'd strongly recommend taking steps to remove yourself from the platform, voting with your feet. You're cetainly not strongly wedded, as major YouTube creators are, many of whom have been taking steps to establish themselves more independently of that one platform and its advertising revenue, through direct donations (generally through Patreon, which I'd put fair money on one of the monopolists buying out at some point, possibly to shut down). What I'd strongly suggest is trialing peer-to-peer video-sharing technologies such as PeerTube.
Note that the independent route may also be subject to copyright claims (will your Internet provider cut you off?), harassment, and/or cracking attempts. YouTube does actually protect you a gainst a fair amount of that. You'll also want to find out what CDN options are available for that video that makes you Internet Famous for a day.
I'd strongly urge you to file complaints with your political representatives and consumer-protection agencies. This would include local (city/county), state, and national representatives, as well as your state's attorney (usually, there may be another consumer protection agency), and national communications and trade agencies (in the US: FCC and FTC). This step combined with seeking out and promoting alternatives is our best way out of the present monopoly hell.
I'd specifically request:
- Appeals processes for account bans.
- Full reports on why invalid bans were imposed.
There's a long list of other reforms people who've spent more time than me on this have come up with. Look up Cory Doctorow, Tim Wu, Tristan Harris, the EFF, and others who are advocating for reforms.
Could be 1.5s of silence in your video repeatedly flagged automatically and cleared manually, or had been script reported by 65535-node botnet that claims to be real individual non-group of people in a remote Eastern Europe village.
Every major social networks has this class of problems, worsening each minute as time goes on, and while your online fame can be exploited to exempt yourself from it, it will probably need a legislative action to control.
Got another email later the same day from YouTube: "We're pleased to let you know that we've recently reviewed your YouTube account and, after taking another look, we can confirm that it is not in violation of our Terms of Service. We have lifted the suspension of your account, and it is once again active and operational."
Must have been an error or glitch, I did not take any action. Maybe the same for you.
Right now their storage is balooning with duplicate content because of the wave of content theft that TikTok has encouraged, and it may be necessary for the clock to be reset, and for their copyright policies and support to be fixed in total. This means that original content creators, and creator funds may also take a big hit until something stable is finally worked out, but it shouldn't let platforms like YouTube off the hook for shoddy copyright policies and and mis-management of the process for many years.
They need to implement a cutoff date for enforcement, the trend of content copying was not popular until TikTok surged in popularity, somewhere around then should be the cutoff point (around 3 years ago). YouTube also created shorts, which was only another poorly thought out enticement for content theft and cloning.
I followed procedure over 2 years ago to request my profile be converted into a music artist profile, and YouTube still has not done anything nor responded... They need to also hire real life moderators and implement a real support and moderation team/process that is professional and accountable. If they don't the entire site will turn into a platform of spam and junk ads and triggering content like TikTok is fast becoming now.
Original content creators are the lifeblood of social media platforms, they shouldn't be required to go unrewarded, and worse yet, they shouldn't be abused and ignored by the platforms they post to... OC creators are the only ones that help platforms to disguise the fact that they're collecting money under the table from big industry.
Email: legal@support.youtube.com
Fax: +1 650 872 8513
Address:
Legal Support
YouTube (Google LLC)
901 Cherry Ave.
San Bruno, CA 94066
USAMaybe bots are trying to muddy the waters of legitimate take down requests by flooding support with fake ones.
Incompetence hat:
Maybe YouTube’s abuse detection is broken.
I would happily move to using a competitor instead except that between the price point (free or better) and the mass audience, there are no effective competitors.
What can we do about this?
This would seemingly be the most straightforward reason. The system flagged a copyright film clip. Though this doesn't explain why you didn't get a notice about just that video.
But honestly, why spend time worrying about this? It sounds like you barely used your account, so just get a new one.
It's kinda like Linux tech support: ask "How do I do X?" and get told to RTFM. But say "Linux sucks because I can't do X" and nerds will fall all over themselves to help you.
A user who wants to publish a video could do that in the form of special links which contain a hash of the video (maybe magnet links do that?).
They could do that on their own website for example. Or in multiple places. Their website, their GitHub pages, their Twitter etc.
The viewer (say Joe) who wants to see such a video would click the special link and have a software that searches it on a decentralized network of nodes.
Some other viewer (say Paul) who recently viewed the video and still has it in his cache could deliver the video to Joe.
In return, Joe could automatically get some crypto currency. Say worth $0.01 or so.
Content aggregators could crawl all these sites and create an experience similar to YouTube. Or maybe this could also be implemented in a decentralized fashion.
The best way I've found to spur YouTube into action though is to @ their account on Twitter... It works for now.
> Notice for Termination or Suspension
> We will notify you with the reason for termination or suspension by YouTube unless we reasonably believe that to do so: (a) would violate the law or the direction of a legal enforcement authority, or would otherwise risk legal liability for YouTube or our Affiliates; (b) would compromise an investigation or the integrity or operation of the Service; or (c) would cause harm to any user, other third party, YouTube or our Affiliates. Where YouTube is terminating your access for Service changes, where reasonably possible, you will be provided with sufficient time to export your Content from the Service.
Given the nature of your videos, and the fact that they did not give you a reason for the ban, the EFF might be interested to hear from you. There’s a case to be made here that YouTube is not fulfilling its side of the EULA.
I’m not even remotely adjacent to being a lawyer, but EFF has good ones. Since you still have access the 5 videos in question, meaning you can provide EFF with their content, you might possess a significant test case. The sticking point could be the private video content; I have no idea how that works. EFF would.
EDIT: upon second read, “or would otherwise risk legal liability for YouTube or our Affiliate” is big enough to drive the broad side of a barn through, and might invalidate the rest. It’d be nice if “adding clauses to make you feel good but which we can 100% ignore” was banned from EULAs.
That video received a strike and was flagged as a scam... before I ever even sent it to the client. YT is ridiculous.
It's instances usually have low quotas though~
1. Have a large enough Twitter following such that complaining will get somebody's attention;
2. Know someone at Google who can contact the right people to resolve this;
3. Be a large enough advertiser such that your account manager will make noise on your behalf; or
4. Be a large enough content producer such that the threat of you pulling your content from Youtube is sufficient to get their attention.
This isn't unique to Youtube or Google. It's just how "support" works on platforms these days.
This is probably the reason why. Was in a similar situation ~2 years ago when my 2006 YouTube account got banned. I was given the chance to appeal the decision where I had to fill out a form. In the form I wrote that I believe the reason I got banned was because of the music that was on my channel and that it may have looked like I was trying to share copyrighted music (I had download links in the description as well, btw). I closed my statement explaining that the music had no copyright.
One week later, to my surprise, the account was restored. Check your email and see if you got a link to where you can fill out the same form I did. Good luck.
Maybe average internet users go to OP's channel, see it's banned, and assume that OP did something illegal—like posting pirated movies, stealing money earned from copyrighted music, or even worse things like posting violent videos, terrorism or child pornography—thus tarnishing OP's good name.
I wish we had some legal mechanism for average citizens that covered the increasingly common case where "company X forced me to spend a bunch of time/money because of their mistake."
P.S. Sorry that happened to you. Good that you had local backups, that's a lesson for us all!
For the non-impulsive answer, I don't really have anything of value to say.
Not even getting response. After the appeal they deleted also my YouTube account which was even more scaring.
It is crazy how much playlist, channels and history was in the account. I am really puzzled that my mobile version still works with my user data.
It's not an acceptable to say "algorithm did it" with no recourse.
Youtube is becoming heavily commercialised leading to the little man getting pushed out, and Youtube losing it's best asset - the wild west of videos.
On top of that, there seems to be more ads than ever and I don't see this ever stopping.
Ditch YouTube.
here's a previous recent thread on similar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26916096