
YouTube accidentally permanently terminated my account - Suncho
https://medium.com/@alexhowlett/youtube-accidentally-permanently-terminated-my-account-4b5852c80679
======
hpcjoe
I keep hearing stories about similar issues. Suddenly someone is terminated
from a Google service for unknown reasons, without any possibility of
reversing such decisions.

This appears to be true of Twitter and others as well.

From my vantage point, it appears to be quite arbitrary. And quite concerning
in a number of cases, given the centralization of email, docs, etc.

I do make backups of google content every so often.

I guess the irony of making a copy of a cloud set of services data locally, as
you may not be able to trust that these services will be there over longer
intervals, is either ironic ... or problematic.

It speaks directly to the concept of risk of extended supply chains ... is the
risk to your data, and ability to interact with services worth maintaining a
presence on the systems?

This behavior on their and related tech giants generally makes me question how
much we should rely on them for important things (like permanent email
addresses) over time. This has been making me uneasy for a while, and seeing
more stories like this is not quelling my discomfort.

~~~
apostacy
It used to be much harder to knock someone you didn't like offline. You used
to have to organize a DDOS attack. But now, all you have to do is organize a
much easier mass-flagging attack. We need to update our threat models to
account for how unreliable major platforms have become.

We can no longer rely on these companies. After big tech spent so much time
investing in their own infrastructure, they are undermining themselves like
this.

We need to just accept that a major liability of using a major platform like
this is that your content may be removed and your account deleted, for unknown
reasons.

Want to host your podcasts? Well don't rely solely on Apple Google or YouTube,
they are not up for the job. Instead, you have to span it on multiple
platforms and tell your audience where to find you if you get deleted.

~~~
chii
This concept of de-platforming is becoming more and more prevailant.

The big techs cannot differentiate between legitimate de-platforming vs a
Denial of Service de-platforming. I think while the big techs have a
legitimate concern for de-platforming things that are deemed hate speech, this
same power can be utilized by individuals to target a de-platforming for
people whose opinions they don't like.

I think big techs should consider a public-court like system - where in order
to deplatform, a jury of peers should be used to make judgements.

~~~
eitland
> The big techs cannot differentiate between legitimate de-platforming

I can try to give some guidelines, I'd love to see improvements (and also like
to know if anyone points out I'm wrong :-)

Legitimate de-platforming is

a) when an individual or organization is removed from the platform based on a
request from law enforcement followed by a review by the platforms staff to
verify that the request is genuine and that the reasons stated are valid.

The account should still not be deleted for a certain number of days, and if
requested by the user or organization, relevant details should be made
available to them to take fight it in court against the relevant law
enforcement agency.

b) when an individual or organization is removed from the platform based on an
written policy, known by the users of the platform in advance and verified by
a second team. Upon request an explanation of why the account was deplatformed
should be made available.

~~~
apostacy
> b) when an individual or organization is removed from the platform based on
> an written policy, known by the users of the platform in advance and
> verified by a second team. Upon request an explanation of why the account
> was deplatformed should be made available.

That alone would be great. They should have to justify exactly why they
removed someone. And by making it explicit, they open a pathway for legal
action.

But more importantly, these platforms need to be declared public utilities and
forced to be transparent. This is not controversial and is usually welcomed by
the public when it happens. Most public utilities that we enjoy today started
out as being completely private.

The fire dept would let your house burn down if you were late with your bills.
The telegraph company would ban you from their private network if you were a
journalist that criticized them. The electric companies would make you agree
to onerous terms to get electricity. And currently we have this mess with
private medical insurance companies and tech platforms.

It is time for us to nationalize Facebook.

~~~
eitland
Edit: added quotes. Added part about not wanting any social network
nationalized.

> But more importantly, these platforms need to be declared public utilities
> and forced to be transparent. This is not controversial and is usually
> welcomed by the public when it happens.

Even just a real threat that it _might_ happen might, if it became visible
enough, drive some introspection and push them in right direction.

> It is time for us to nationalize Facebook.

Assuming you are from US (but mostly valid anyway): Not sure if I'd want your
president, now or in 6 years, to have more say over the biggest social media
networks than they already have.

------
LeoPanthera
How many Google accounts are arbitrarily nuked, and host content that is not
famous enough to make the front page of HN, or Reddit, or some other noisy
social media site?

~~~
celticninja
plenty, on HN there is a chance you will know someone at Google or Twitter or
can raise attention of someone who works there. if you have a legitimate case
it seems people will try to help some out. but that is not the way to handle
it en masse.

the big companies have decided that customer service is not for users (we
aren't customers). once they start doing call centres it will just become a
cost for ever more.

~~~
chx
> once they start doing call centres it will just become a cost for ever more.

then charge for it? Even support that only deals with account terminations
would be worth $5, $10 a month to quite a few of us, I would think. You have a
busy YouTube channel, ten bucks a month is not that much to ensure it doesn't
go up flames accidentally.

~~~
chii
how come the revenue google makes in advertising on those videos can't be used
to cover the cost of such support?

It should not cost money for a user to correct the mistake of a service
provider. If the telephone company shutdown my number, i have the
telecommunications onbudsman to call and get the problem fixed. Granted,
youtube isn't as essential as a phone, a similar body should exist to ensure
that online service providers are treating customers fairly.

~~~
username90
> It should not cost money for a user to correct the mistake of a service
> provider.

You aren't paying for the service though, the people who buy ads are.

~~~
aglionby
Isn't taking this as an absolutist view kind of myopic? Sure, people don't pay
anything to watch and each person's eyeballs aren't worth that much. But
pretty much the entire value of the service is locked up in the crowd of these
people, led by the minority who actually create things. Annoy enough of the
creators (or lose the trust of those who see what happens to their peers) and
they'll start to leave, taking your advert-viewing crowd with them. The
network effect makes this really difficult and slow to begin with, but we're
already seeing attempts by people like Wendover Productions with things like
Nebula and CuriosityStream. I'm curious to see how this plays out over the
next few years (and if it's similar to anything that's happened
historically?).

~~~
chii
> things like Nebula and CuriosityStream

i wish them success, but i doubt they will see the sort of revenue possible
with youtube. These premium subscription services are more like netflix, where
they need to provide value proposition to the payer. They don't scale tbh, as
the majority of the internet is non-paying. I suppose with a large enough
backlog, it can start to look attractive for viewers to pay to subscribe.

But then you have to see that every company wants their subscription. If you
wanted to have access to each service, you'd end up paying 100's of dollars
per month. So more likely to happen is that people see a specific series they
want, and pay for just that month.

Youtube's business model is much more broad and does not depend on quality
content, but on the existence of a large audience. I think creators go to
where the audience is, not the other way around.

------
londons_explore
I would guess that someone nefarious got access to the Google account
associated with that youtube account...

If you can log into an account, it's pretty easy to get an account
permabanned.

Just paste some links to well known child porn trading sites into the
description, and the account gets banned within about half an hour. Someone at
my school modified a chrome extension to do that and half the schools youtube
accts got banned forever!

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Agreed.

The co-timed arrival of the email about his GSuite account, and the removal of
the YouTube (which GSuite support said was coincidental and unrelated) seems
likely to be the product of a malicious activist working through the OP's
accounts trying to cause trouble.

------
lightwin
Looks like youtube account has been restored. Update from the medium article:

>> UPDATE: We’re back as of 8:39pm EDT April 11, 2020! I received the
following email from YouTube: Hi there, After a review of your account, we
have confirmed that your YouTube account is not in violation of our Terms of
Service. As such, we have unsuspended your account. This means your account is
once again active and operational. If you forgot your password, please visit
this link to reset it: <snip> Sincerely, The YouTube Team

~~~
ekianjo
No apologies?

~~~
codegladiator
Please lets not start this. Apologies means nothing, especially coming from
companies.

~~~
skissane
What I’d really want is not an apology but a post mortem: “here’s what caused
this to happen and here’s what we are doing so it doesn’t happen again”

~~~
rovr138
This is what’s important from a company.

------
pbhjpbhj
I liked how Google's pro-forma email didn't fill in the blank as to why they
flagged the account ... but they still sent that message. Surely that's a
pretty easy failure to capture, I'm surprised Google can't spot such failures.

~~~
geitir
You're talking about a company who recently stuck a big logo on the spacebar
of their Android keyboard

~~~
ship_it
What??? Source? (iPhone user here)

~~~
londons_explore
Googles companywide policy is to prominently display the Google logo whenever
Googles AI or aggregate data is being used. It's part of their efforts to make
the public understand that collecting aggregate data can benefit the public.

The keyboard uses googles AI to predict words using their language modelling,
hence why it needs to display the google logo. With the "G" button removed
from the top left, they decided to brand the spacebar instead.

------
kmfrk
Another fun thing that can happen with YouTube channels is getting them banned
because you used titles and thumbnails that were too similar. This can get
flagged as spam, which also increases the likelihood of just getting reviewed
algorithmically.

Basically no appeal process unless you can explore some unofficial means of
appeal like this one.

How's that for motivation to work on your thumbnails not and naming things
"Show X #1..n".

Yes, this specific issue might be automated more because of coronavirus, but
the general issue is not a novel one.

\--

The only silver lining is that this doesn' take down your entire Google
account like some YouTube bans do. (Woo!)

------
gdulli
I'm glad it was resolved, but what am I supposed to do when Google wrongfully
suspends my account and my submission here doesn't make it to the front page?

~~~
mirimir
It'd be really cool if OP could document exactly what happened, and how
exactly it got fixed. Or if someone else could leak relevant information
anonymously. But I appreciate that nobody involved would want to attract
attention.

~~~
Shorel
How can anybody do that if Google doesn't provide such information?

~~~
mirimir
Someone at Google could. Someone at Google fixed it, and others there are
likely aware of the circumstances.

~~~
6nf
That’s not going to happen. Google won’t say a word on this.

~~~
mirimir
Yes, I know that "Google" won't. But there have been leaks about many issues.
And this is arguably a huge, if poorly reported, issue. Perhaps not relative
to the total user population, but huge in absolute terms.

------
pjc50
It's quite possible that it was a politically motivated complaint. We'd never
know.

~~~
pietrovismara
It obviously is. People sitting down and calmly discussing private property
can only be seen as threatening if you are a capitalist or a landlord. They
are scared, given the current crisis. I would be scared too as a capitalist.

------
gentleman11
I met Alex once in some online chats during startup school a couple of years
back where he was working on a universal basic income system. Very smart and
interesting guy. Very disappointed that somebody like him has to deal with
this, it’s probably a major blow to his project

------
fortran77
It's interesting reading about what Karl Wikderquist's writings are about to
get some insight into who orgranized the "report brigade" to get him banned:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Widerquist#Empirical_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Widerquist#Empirical_and_anthropological_criticism_of_contemporary_political_theory)

~~~
zozbot234
Interesting point. There's nothing much that's outright wrong with these
claims, in fact many social scientists even of a fairly libertarian bent would
basically agree with them. And these days basic income is increasingly being
proposed from all sides of the political spectrum.

~~~
fortran77
I can certainly see a brigade of youthful libertarians hitting the "report"
button en masse.

------
flywithdolp
Too many problems from Youtube in the last year with banning/deleting
accounts.

I wish we had a good alternative

------
Others
I love Google's products, and I put up with the fact that they harvest my
data. But to have such terrible support for their services is absolutely
ludicrous. I've seen too many stories of people losing their content, email
addresses, services they rely on, or livelihoods. All because Google is too
cheap to provide a reasonable way for customers to talk to a person about
their problem.

I understand this is expensive and hard, but to be a company worth 100s of
billions, and still neglect this is unacceptable. I think that there is a
social responsibility that comes with running such a large and important web
service, a responsibility that Google is neglecting.

~~~
maceurt
It would be cool if anybody else could make a real competitor to youtube then
Google would have to actually cater more to content creators. However, sadly I
think youtube is just too far ahead and google has way to many resources and
time spent in the space for any competitor to even be able to make a dent into
youtube's market.

~~~
Razengan
YouTube is one of the reasons I will probably always dislike Google for.

They bought an existing service, made few improvements to it, made it worse in
some ways, continue to ignore its major problems, and keep it artificially
limited on their competitors' platforms (like not supporting the native
Picture-in-Picture feature on iPad for years.)

Worst of all, because they are So Big, people are preemptively disheartened
from even imagining a competitor.

~~~
michaelt
_> made very few improvements to it,_

Before the acquisition Youtube were getting their ass kicked about all the
copyright violation on the site, they were losing money, they had no ad
revenue sharing with video creators, they only supported low-resolution video,
and only in an Adobe Flash player.

All of which changed after the acquisition.

I would agree, of course, that there's plenty wrong with Youtube these days,
and the pace of innovation has dropped a lot.

~~~
Mirioron
> _they had no ad revenue sharing with video creators_

This is the one point that makes YouTube so difficult to shake. The money is
attractive to creators and YouTube offers the most money with the largest
audience. YouTube themselves actually gets 45% of the revenue, while the
creator gets 55%.

~~~
dannyw
70/30 sharing on the ad platform side is common. Take away that, and you have
YouTube taking another 21% for hosting, engagement, and tooling.

It’s actually really cheap if you’re thinking about it.

~~~
chii
vimeo has a $55/month cost for 5T of videos. Most youtube channels that are
businesses make way more than $55 per month, and youtube keeps way more than
$55 of their ad revenue.

I dont think the major reason creators choose youtube because it's "cheap" \-
it aint. It's the only game in town where there's sufficient advertiser demand
to pay out money. And youtube knows this, and thus, can charge the 45% split.
The "free" aspect is also keeping out new competitors - the business moat is
huge. There's a reason why microsoft or amazon isn't getting in the game.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
Advertiser demand may be part of it, but there's also discoverability.

Turning up around YouTube must be extremely valuable. If your content is only
on Vimeo, your odds of being chosen by the mighty YouTube algorithm are 0%.

> microsoft or amazon isn't getting in the game

You're right really, and it's not really the same thing, but they do both
offer free file-storage services capable of streaming video to the browser.

------
ColinWright
Here's a note for everyone:

> _I do have backup archives of many of the videos and they will be back
> online again as soon as possible. Unfortunately, I was not diligent enough
> in keeping backups — especially early on. I am missing the following 21
> videos ..._

Another reminder, yet again, not to trust "Cloud Services" and always to have
a copy of data you care about.

I hope the problem gets resolved and the channel is restored, I hope we get to
hear what happens.

~~~
quercy
Well, don't trust "Cloud Services" unless you're paying them $10k+ a month.

~~~
wegs
Nah. With Google, the attitude of ad-supported extends to B2B. You can pay
them a megabuck a year, and still get steamrolled by their AI having a random
bug.

~~~
d1zzy
Do you have an example of paying customer giving Google >=$1m a year and still
get steamrolled by AI without being able to get in touch with a human and
correct the issue?

~~~
wegs
I had a very similar one in my career. It's a little bit more complex than
that, though -- the value of us as a customer was >>$1 mil per year (Google
had several dedicated engineers for the partnership), but it wasn't a flat-on
paying customer relationship.

The failure happened in a different part of Google than the one managing the
relationship. The people who wanted the partnership to succeed were in
Google's cloud hosting business. The failure was in Youtube. It wasn't
anything like a bad flag; just a straight-up bug (which caused us to move our
videos to S3, and scramble to put together our own video player).

Yes, we could get in contact with a human. No, the problem couldn't be fixed.
Yes, Google did ultimately lose >>$1 million/year in revenue in part as a
result of this and other failures (to AWS).

------
wegs
Which is why I would never trust Google for any business functions.

These things happen all the time with Google. The model is based on your value
being your ad revenue. If the cost of support outweighs your future ad
revenue, which it always does, you're ignored. Everything is automated, and no
matter what bad decision the machine makes, you can't appeal.

Unfortunately, that attitude translates to GSuite for Business, Google Compute
Engine, etc. A non-paying customer gets better support from Microsoft (which
is built around B2B) than a business customer does from Google.

Google gives better technology than Microsoft, but at the end of the day, the
risk just isn't worth it: If Google's AI messes up, you're out of business.

(And Amazon has better support and technology than Google).

~~~
grishka
Actually, when it comes to getting any kind of support from Google,
connections are of paramount importance. I've seen countless stories of people
having problems with their Google Play developer accounts, for example being
terminated for no reason and hitting the wall trying to appeal the way they
suggest. Yet, if you know anyone from Google's developer relations, you'll
usually have all your issues figured out in no time by emailing them. They're
really nice guys.

Of course it shouldn't be like this, but that's the way it's been for as long
as I've been an Android developer.

~~~
downerending
That's nice when it works. (Didn't for me.)

But it's absolutely no way to run a business. Pass.

------
dchyrdvh
One day Google locked one of my gmail accounts and demanded a verified phone
number in exchange for access. Luckily, that email wasn't that important.
However this taught me a lesson: next time Google is going to lock my
important gmail and demand an ID, W2, routing number, full address and medical
records in exchange for access and then I'll have a hard choice. That day I
finally put effort into setting up my own email domain.

------
Mindwipe
It's only a matter of time until the EU regulates something about this sort of
arbitrary account termination with no recourse to a (manned) customer service
center, probably with an escalation to a regulator.

If the UK's Online Harms regulator ever actually happens (and god help us all
if it ever does) I'd expect them to do an investigation fairly rapidly.

Google would be better off getting ahead of this.

------
sneak
I lost a 12 year old Twitter account (with nearly 10k followers) last month as
well. No communication whatsoever from Twitter, even after I opened a ticket
about it.

I'm beginning to think that publishing anywhere except my own site is foolish.

~~~
spullara
Did you change your birthday such that you were < 13 when you opened it? That
is common thing that happens.

~~~
ShakataGaNai
That's why you _always_ put down your birthday as January 1, 1901 (or whatever
earliest date they allow).

~~~
_nalply
Then you've violated the terms of service and when they find out they have an
excuse to kick you.

~~~
KozmoNau7
Put in 01/01/1970 instead.

It's well safe for any age checks and limits, and it could just be there
because of a *nix timestamp glitch.

------
WayToDoor
The fact that the only support you get from Google is if your HN post is
upvoted enough to go to the frontpage should be something that would be a red
flag to any business. Guess Google don't care, support cost money, and you
can't add ads in there.

~~~
JPKab
True story I had a major issue where a new Google cloud service was restarting
instances that were relatively expensive and billing me for them about 4 years
ago. it was doing so completely automatically and I would log back in and see
that these instances have been restarted. Couldn't get anyone to help me until
I went on the Google BigQuery subreddit and bitched directly to their chief
evangelist. They finally fixed it after that. Lesson learned. That company
doesn't know how to hire people who don't constantly want to do interesting
things. it turns out that running a business and supporting customers isn't
always super fun and gratifying.

And can we admit that while their tech is still top-notch their software
libraries in the open source realm are not? Compared to pytorch tensorflow is
a piece of s __*. It 's so so bad now.

They didn't do well in the front end space either. React blows angular 2 away.
Remember dart? Neither do I. Sure do miss inbox.

------
qu4ku
Twitter has suspended my account two+ weeks ago without a reason and didn't
even notify me about that by e-mail. They don't respond to my appeals either.

Decentralize all the things.

------
badassiel
Some people are saying self-hosting content is the way to go. People
interested pursuing that way can look into "IPFS". There's lot of tools to
make the "hosting" part easy (static websites are easy on bare IPFS it self)
Some keywords to search for are DTube, Temporal, Textile. I'm already on way
to self-host my data, hope you can get on bandwagon as well.

------
aritmo
What you can do, is upvote the article so that eventually some YouTube
engineer happens to see it. Not much else to do.

~~~
syshum
>>>What you can do

Support Other Video hosting platforms

Advise Creators to upload to multiple Platforms

When Sharing links, if the content it on another platform share that instead
of YT

YT stays on top because people refuse to move off it

~~~
encom
[https://www.bitchute.com/](https://www.bitchute.com/)

You can have it automatically pull content from your YouTube channel to your
BitChute channel. Make sure to let your viewers know about it in advance, so
when Google pulls the rug out from under you, for no reason, they know where
to find your content.

~~~
reportingsjr
Yeaaahhhh, bitchute is definitely worse having YouTube as a monopoly.

Bitchute is absolutely full of racists, conspiracy theories, and just awful
people in general. I wouldn't touch it with a 2m stick.

~~~
mirimir
That's a good sign, actually. Because it means that you'd need to push pretty
hard to get banned.

~~~
zozbot234
Not necessarily. The platform might just have political biases of its own. But
that's also why it can be good to have more variety: it means biases are a lot
more likely to cancel out over time.

~~~
mirimir
That's a good point. So yes, diversity is good.

------
guggle
Happened to me years ago with Flickr... all my pictures lost, including
family. This is how you learn the hard way that the cloud is just someone
else's computer.

------
dehrmann
The problem isn't so much that this happened. Account terminations are usually
manual processes, so from time to time, a human's going to do the wrong thing.
The real problem is that there's no recourse, and you get trapped in a
customer (or non-customer, so Youtubers don't even pay?) service maze.

------
jimnotgym
Self-regulation has failed. YouTube, and others, failures to employ proper
content moderation is hitting both consumers and creators. This market is
broken

------
valuearb
I’m so conflicted because YouTube is absolutely in the wrong here, but
Universal Basic Income is such a silly idea.

------
ashtonkem
I honestly kind of hate most of Google’s products. While they are incredibly
reliable, they often have inconsistent and poor UX, and are liable to either
cancel or change the entire UI on a whim.

~~~
dralley
Redesigned Gmail is ludicrously slow and glitchy in so many ways that old-
Gmail was not. According to about:performance, not only is it consistently the
most demanding tab in terms of CPU (usually by a wide margin), but it also
uses nearly double the memory of Youtube, which is itself also much more
bloated than it used to be.

Google is supposed to hire the best and brightest engineers around, yet
apparently they require 60-120 megabytes of RAM just to show a couple of lines
of text on the screen. It's absolutely pathetic.

~~~
mrob
Plain HTML version is still available and very fast.

~~~
exikyut
And wraps sent emails at 72 characters, which looks incredibly unprofessional.
And doesn't autosave drafts.

------
coleifer
It really sucks you can't run your own webserver and host your own videos.

------
superasn
I have all my photos including many precious pics like my daughter's first
birthday, etc backed up only with Google photos (as GPhotos often cleans up my
phones it removes the original too).

Post like these are a true wake up call. I definitely need to setup something
like syncthing to backup at least one more to good old usb 1tb drive. I guess
you should too if you're in the same boat.

~~~
mceachen
Make sure you get a Google Takeout, but realize that much of the image
metadata is deleted (and sometimes outright changed) from the originals.

My takeout failed with an write until I requested an archive that was only
photos, and only a year-subset of my library (which required me to make a
manual album).

I also tried the open source "timeliner" project, (which does incremental
backups very conveniently), but due to Google's API, all GPS tags are stripped
from what the images that it can pull down.

If SyncThing doesn't work for you, you can also try Resilio Sync.

If you need software to manage all your photos and videos, you might want to
try PhotoStructure! (I'm the author, details in my profile).

~~~
benhurmarcel
Is there a method for automatic backup of Google Photos? Something that a
script could do, without manually using Google Takeout.

Also, is there another service to backup photos that doesn't modify the data?
I was thinking of using Nextcloud. But the prices for Google One are quite
attractive.

~~~
mceachen
[https://github.com/mholt/timeliner](https://github.com/mholt/timeliner) is
the script I referenced, and it does incremental backups. It is limited by
what Google's API exposes, though, so what you get back is not what you
uploaded: it's got many tags stripped, including GPS.

It's really best to back up the originals that are on your phone. SyncThing
and Resilio will do that automatically to your NAS.

------
sunstone
Yahoo, with malice aforethought, deleted my email account of 20 years.

------
jasonvorhe
> company x permanently terminated my account

> account gets reactivated after a complaint to customer support

So it wasn't permanent.

------
mirimir
For what it's worth, I believe that "recklessly" is more accurate than
"accidentally". In the motor vehicle context, for example, people acting more
or less prudently, and in good faith, occasionally have accidents. But when
people aren't acting prudently, we call them reckless.

------
quellhorst
You don't own your social media accounts. You need to build your own brand
with your own domain and collect email addresses of your customers.

~~~
govHlthcareLol
Emails aren't safe. I have a large following, but if 0.1% of people mark you
as Spam, you lose your abilities to send.

~~~
gbear605
It's wild really, I've been seeing emails from totally trusted sources -
credit card bills, bank statements - and people that I have in my contact list
go directly to my spam box.

------
pietrovismara
The fact alone that they are banning "content" (it was just a harmless title
and a pic) about private property in this period is not a coincidence.

There was no way to link that title "Boston Basic Income #98: Karl Widerquist
on Private Property" to any violation of the law.

I think they are just scared that in this period, talking about private
property will bring people to uprise/unite to stop paying rents. YouTube is
still part of the capitalist system and will do its part to protect it. And
nobody is talking about this kind of censorship.

------
Lev1a
> accidentally

Google don't accidentally terminate accounts or remove/block videos.

They intentionally left that job to AlGoRiThMs instead of using actual people
capable of reason/thought. That's no "accident".

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RandomBacon
You're not wrong, but you are probably being downvoted because you're trying
to be cute with your capitalization of the word "algorithms". Please don't do
that.

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hombre_fatal
Well, "accidentally" also communicates that it was done automatically without
human review and that human review ended up reversing the decision. I don't
think splitting hairs with "well technically they intended for it to happen
automatically so it couldn't have been accidental" adds to the discussion.
Automatic processes absolutely make mistakes.

This should be obvious after 10 seconds of thought, but here's an example:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem)

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iandanforth
I would support legislation that mandated they have phone support, were
required to publish their content guidelines and decision making manual,
disclose who did the review, and provide for a neutral* third party to
arbitrate disputes.

*yeah yeah I know "neutral"

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RichardHeart
YouTube is also banning all cryptocurrency channels, strike by strike. For no
reason. It's disgusting. I know, because I have such a channel with a strike.
2 more and it's permanent delete. Can't appeal, as the livestream was deleted
before it was in progress. No response to appeals for over a month and a half.
(You get 1 warning before the strikes start, I was able to appeal only that.)

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econcon
Only channel I like on YouTube is applied sciences, hopefully it will never
get deleted.

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finnthehuman
That channel's probably fine, he works for Google.

