YouTube suspends Google accounts of Markiplier's viewers for minor emote spam

The real issue here is that (reportedly) the people who spammed got their GMail accounts shut down.<p>That&#x27;s outrageous.<p>That&#x27;s your real-life, not just your online-life. Your GMail account isn&#x27;t even related at all to your YouTube identity.<p>Remember: if you aren&#x27;t _at least_ paying for your e-mail service you don&#x27;t own your own mailbox. When was the last time you made a backup of your GMail account? What contingency plan do you have in-place if Google ever accidentally, unintentionally, or in this case, intentionally, shuts it down?<p>(Disclaimer: I pay $20&#x2F;mo for an Office 365 E3 account for my personal mailbox)

I wish lawmakers instead of spending time on misguided cookie banner laws, spent more time on things like this.<p>Behavior like this is completely unacceptable, it is equivalent to store owner throwing you out because he thought your hair are red.<p>People whose accounts are being suspended without warning, without explanation, and without a way to appeal, like in this case, should be able to sue the company for a large sum of money, so that company knows that breaching contracts is not a good thing.<p>The job of government is to help people establish contracts between themselves, and to help keeping the explicit and implicit terms of the contract. The random suspension of account is likely a more serious breach of contract than selling private data to third parties.

Just absurd, the damage of having my entire google account being banned is seriously non-trivial and would easily cost thousands of Dollars worth of time and energy to deal with. I remember having the fear of what&#x27;s happening here when Google originally purchased YouTube but after years of non-issue I forgot about the possibility. For me, this is the last straw with Google, the risk of being banned for such an arbitrary reason is simply too high for me and I&#x27;m going to start moving documents and accounts from their services.<p>It baffles me, they hire some of the worlds more intelligent people but the products&#x2F;systems they produce are constantly idiotic and daft.

There are too many people here advocating to host your own email in your own domain. Please be warned that it has its own risks:<p>By hosting your main email on a custom domain(not a provider) you open a new attack vector for identity theft. There was an article on HN just a couple weeks ago about someone getting hacked by exactly this attack form. IIRC it was godaddy having stupid verification process.<p>Someone can hijack your godaddy&#x2F;namecheap&#x2F;gandi account and point the MX DNS records of the domain to their own server and receive all your &quot;Forgot your password? here is the link to reset!&quot; emails<p>This a very bad advice unless you actually know what are the risks.<p>Maybe suggesting a paid email provider would be better, does anyone know of any reliable email providers that you pay for what you are getting and they are not selling your account data or block you for some reason?

Constant news about Google banning accounts for various mistakes, small or large, reminds me of a certain country&#x27;s social credit system. When will they start banning people that have any kind of contact with accounts in bad standing? Will they start denying purchases on Google Pay depending on how well behaved the account is?

What blows me away is that the supposedly manual reviews believe that these Google-wide permanent bans are appropriate for “spamming emotes” in a stream.<p>Google employees, you hold too much power to be so arbitrary with your bans. You hold people’s digital lives (and, with Android, a portion of their physical lives) in your hands. Please be a bit more responsible with that power.

And he&#x27;ll make a fuss, a video, and it&#x27;ll get fixed. They&#x27;ll all get their stuff back. It&#x27;ll add to the\ sour taste in his mouth but it&#x27;ll get fixed.<p>While smaller creators in similar situations are completely out of luck. Throw a support ticket into the ether. And just have to hope more and pray a bigger Youtuber picks up their plea and their video gets popular so that it gets fixed.

This boils down to trust. We need to trust that our email provider won’t turn off. We need to trust that our ISP won’t shut off our internet. We need to trust that our cell provider won’t shut off our service. We need to trust that our power company won’t shut off our power.<p>There is simply far too much on the line here to not have protections. The use contract of email providers needs to regulated.

I wish platforms like Facebook and YouTube would stop pretending they can build “communities” with one billion people.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;policies.google.com&#x2F;terms?hl=en-US#toc-modification" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;policies.google.com&#x2F;terms?hl=en-US#toc-modification</a><p>&quot;Google may also stop providing Services to you, or add or create new limits to our Services at any time.&quot;

Google’s approach to coping with bad actors, i.e. immediately cutting off people from their entire Google presence for anything that trips their automated systems on any individual platform, is incredibly abusive. People can have years and years worth of data locked away permanently simply because they post a line of emojis on a YouTube video? Simply astonishing.<p>Why would anyone trust Google with any important part of their lives based on this kind of behaviour?

Things like this are a good argument for breaking up the tech giants. It&#x27;s an example of how monopolies hurt consumers.

Wonder if the ban related to this rule<p>Repetitive comments: Leaving large amounts of identical, untargeted or repetitive comments.

Looks like they are trying to use AI for automation and it&#x27;s screwed up. Again. And it will and must happen again and again to get better.<p>Actually they call this stressful work and actively explicitly are working towards not getting workers to do this work for their own benefit if you believe HR and the mental health supporters of this policy.<p>I forget the actual term it&#x27;s something like &quot;Mental Health Ops&#x27;.<p>Why should Google make their contactors suffer digging through video chat when they can get an AI to do it for them? This is literally their policy, it&#x27;s not satire.

&quot;The accounts have already been reinstated. We handled that last night. 2. The whole-account &quot;ban&quot; was a common anti-spam measure we use. The account is disabled until the user verifies a phone number by getting a code in an SMS.&quot;<p>Is g00gle harvesting mobile numbers?

Google seems to be constantly playing with any of their algorithms... I totally understand that it’s their business, but especially YouTube gets worse and worse.

oh wow! there must be more backstory to this. finding it hard to believe that whole google accounts got suspended for spamming a youtube video chat!

Would it be a reasonable and temporary solution to ban accounts at a service level? So spamming on YouTube bans access to YouTube, etc.

How does this even get coded? Bug in some rules engine for detecting spam?

You&#x27;d think that Google would get better at dealing with this situation after, oh, say, <i>six years</i> of having the problems of forced multi-service integration (and abuse countermeasures) pointed out to them:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6746731" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6746731</a> [1]<p>But no.<p>Just from my own experience, I&#x27;ve been locked out of my Google account[2], my <i>real</i> Google account[3], and of course, when the company, as it on very rare an infrequent occasions does, cancels services, found myself (and a few million others) scrambling to salvage content and communities.[4]<p>Others have had slightly worse authentication&#x2F;access situations.[5]<p>To be fair: the problem is a complicated one, and Google sees a lot of abuse. Or, as in Mariplier&#x27;s community&#x27;s experience: activity which looks a lot like spam, at a multi-billion-user scale, which can make assessment difficult.<p>(Though as has been pointed out: if scale of operations makes reasonable levels of service provisioning prohibitive, perhaps you shouldn&#x27;t be operating at that scale?)<p>Google <i>do</i> manage to cull a lot of spam, abuse, and other crud. In my some-time career of trying to get hard numbers regarding aspects of Google+ membership and activity, I found:<p>- G+ communities were being created <i>and deleted</i> at a prodigious clip of thousands per day. Even in the final months of the site, several hundred thousand new communities were added.<p>- A strong predictor for whether or not a G+ profile would be deleted was <i>if it had ever posted public content</i>. By a factor of about 10 over profiles with no visible content. Presumably, many of these were spam or other abusive profiles.<p>- The very most active profiles across a small sampling of recent Communities posts were spammers, and by the time I&#x27;d gone back to verify the top few, most or all their content was removed.<p>When you&#x27;re operating at large scale, it&#x27;s difficult to make discerning, accurate, fair, or consistent decisions. That&#x27;s understandable.<p>But <i>you should be aware of this</i> and design systems to recover gracefully from errors. Which includes not discomfitting, annoying, or distressing users excessively. Someting Google have repeatedly failed at.<p>________________________________<p>Notes:<p>1. The day that item ran, the top three items on HN were either directly or indirectly about my experience or frustrations with the then-new Google+ - YouTube accounts merger. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;YgEjUuI_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&amp;shape=thumb&amp;fidelity=medium" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;YgEjUuI_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&amp;shape=thumb&amp;f...</a><p>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;2w618r&#x2F;how_to_kill_your_google_account_access_it_via_tor&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;2w618r&#x2F;how_to_...</a><p>3. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3mo7l6&#x2F;that_google_identity_thing_again_who_are_you_is&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3mo7l6&#x2F;that_go...</a><p>4. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;social.antefriguserat.de&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;Goals" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;social.antefriguserat.de&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;Goals</a><p>5. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;12&#x2F;13&#x2F;us&#x2F;politics&#x2F;russia-hack-election-dnc.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;12&#x2F;13&#x2F;us&#x2F;politics&#x2F;russia-hack-e...</a>

I wish we could ban them too.

You mean YouTube comments are now moderated? That’s very welcome and long overdue.