YouTube accidentally permanently terminated my account

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.<p>This appears to be true of Twitter and others as well.<p>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.<p>I do make backups of google content every so often.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.

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?

I would guess that someone nefarious got access to the Google account associated with that youtube account...<p>If you can log into an account, it&#x27;s pretty easy to get an account permabanned.<p>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!

Looks like youtube account has been restored. Update from the medium article:<p>&gt;&gt; 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: &lt;snip&gt; Sincerely, The YouTube Team

I liked how Google&#x27;s pro-forma email didn&#x27;t fill in the blank as to why they flagged the account ... but they still sent that message. Surely that&#x27;s a pretty easy failure to capture, I&#x27;m surprised Google can&#x27;t spot such failures.

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.<p>Basically no appeal process unless you can explore some unofficial means of appeal like this one.<p>How&#x27;s that for motivation to work on your thumbnails not and naming things &quot;Show X #1..n&quot;.<p>Yes, this specific issue might be automated more because of coronavirus, but the general issue is not a novel one.<p>--<p>The only silver lining is that this doesn&#x27; take down your entire Google account like some YouTube bans do. (Woo!)

I&#x27;m glad it was resolved, but what am I supposed to do when Google wrongfully suspends my account and my submission here doesn&#x27;t make it to the front page?

It&#x27;s quite possible that it was a politically motivated complaint. We&#x27;d never know.

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

It&#x27;s interesting reading about what Karl Wikderquist&#x27;s writings are about to get some insight into who orgranized the &quot;report brigade&quot; to get him banned:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Karl_Widerquist#Empirical_and_anthropological_criticism_of_contemporary_political_theory" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Karl_Widerquist#Empirical_and_...</a>

Too many problems from Youtube in the last year with banning&#x2F;deleting accounts.<p>I wish we had a good alternative

I love Google&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>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.

Here&#x27;s a note for everyone:<p>&gt; <i>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 ...</i><p>Another reminder, yet again, not to trust &quot;Cloud Services&quot; and always to have a copy of data you care about.<p>I hope the problem gets resolved and the channel is restored, I hope we get to hear what happens.

Which is why I would never trust Google for any business functions.<p>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&#x27;re ignored. Everything is automated, and no matter what bad decision the machine makes, you can&#x27;t appeal.<p>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.<p>Google gives better technology than Microsoft, but at the end of the day, the risk just isn&#x27;t worth it: If Google&#x27;s AI messes up, you&#x27;re out of business.<p>(And Amazon has better support and technology than Google).

One day Google locked one of my gmail accounts and demanded a verified phone number in exchange for access. Luckily, that email wasn&#x27;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&#x27;ll have a hard choice. That day I finally put effort into setting up my own email domain.

It&#x27;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.<p>If the UK&#x27;s Online Harms regulator ever actually happens (and god help us all if it ever does) I&#x27;d expect them to do an investigation fairly rapidly.<p>Google would be better off getting ahead of this.

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.<p>I&#x27;m beginning to think that publishing anywhere except my own site is foolish.

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&#x27;t care, support cost money, and you can&#x27;t add ads in there.

Twitter has suspended my account two+ weeks ago without a reason and didn&#x27;t even notify me about that by e-mail. They don&#x27;t respond to my appeals either.<p>Decentralize all the things.

Some people are saying self-hosting content is the way to go. People interested pursuing that way can look into &quot;IPFS&quot;. There&#x27;s lot of tools to make the &quot;hosting&quot; part easy (static websites are easy on bare IPFS it self) Some keywords to search for are DTube, Temporal, Textile. I&#x27;m already on way to self-host my data, hope you can get on bandwagon as well.

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

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&#x27;s computer.

The problem isn&#x27;t so much that this happened. Account terminations are usually manual processes, so from time to time, a human&#x27;s going to do the wrong thing. The real problem is that there&#x27;s no recourse, and you get trapped in a customer (or non-customer, so Youtubers don&#x27;t even pay?) service maze.

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

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

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.

It really sucks you can&#x27;t run your own webserver and host your own videos.

I have all my photos including many precious pics like my daughter&#x27;s first birthday, etc backed up only with Google photos (as GPhotos often cleans up my phones it removes the original too).<p>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&#x27;re in the same boat.

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

&gt; company x permanently terminated my account<p>&gt; account gets reactivated after a complaint to customer support<p>So it wasn&#x27;t permanent.

For what it&#x27;s worth, I believe that &quot;recklessly&quot; is more accurate than &quot;accidentally&quot;. In the motor vehicle context, for example, people acting more or less prudently, and in good faith, occasionally have accidents. But when people aren&#x27;t acting prudently, we call them reckless.

You don&#x27;t own your social media accounts. You need to build your own brand with your own domain and collect email addresses of your customers.

The fact alone that they are banning &quot;content&quot; (it was just a harmless title and a pic) about private property in this period is not a coincidence.<p>There was no way to link that title &quot;Boston Basic Income #98: Karl Widerquist on Private Property&quot; to any violation of the law.<p>I think they are just scared that in this period, talking about private property will bring people to uprise&#x2F;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.

&gt; accidentally<p>Google don&#x27;t accidentally terminate accounts or remove&#x2F;block videos.<p>They intentionally left that job to AlGoRiThMs instead of using actual people capable of reason&#x2F;thought. That&#x27;s no &quot;accident&quot;.

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.<p>*yeah yeah I know &quot;neutral&quot;

YouTube is also banning all cryptocurrency channels, strike by strike. For no reason. It&#x27;s disgusting. I know, because I have such a channel with a strike. 2 more and it&#x27;s permanent delete. Can&#x27;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.)

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