How my 4-year-old channel ended
Hey my friends, how’s it going? Programmer here.
Exactly: this happened. My YouTube channel was “banned.” And it wasn’t just banned with warnings and following the usual procedures. I didn’t get a strike (I’ll explain that later), I wasn’t notified about any restrictions. I was simply uploading my daily videos, there was a connection error, and upon refreshing the page I was informed that my channel was banned and I was prohibited from creating any other YouTube account.
It’s worth remembering that the account was active for 4 years, with over 4000 videos, payments received and monetized, monthly subscribers, and courses promoted on the platform.
But we’ll get to that later, first let’s understand how a YouTube ban works:
YouTube and the 3 strikes
As a rule, YouTube works as follows: 3 strikes for 90 days (I had seen 365 days, but the link below shows 90 days).
This means that you can receive a maximum of 3 “strikes,” which would be account violations, in that period before your channel is banned (according to this post here: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802032).
Each strike is notified by email and requires your confirmation that you have read it to be enforced (also as a rule).
About 2 years ago, I received one (unfairly) when I posted a video of the GTA1 game download on the Internet Archive (it was the demo version and publicly available), but I was penalized for piracy and couldn’t appeal. Even so, it was completely outside the strike accumulation period, and they didn’t reach 3 as a rule.
Remember again that I wasn’t notified, I didn’t receive any strikes, I just lost my account immediately. I appealed and didn’t get a positive response.
According to their justification attached to the post, I facilitated the sale of controlled medications without a prescription.
My defense, not that it matters much to them since they didn’t even open a support channel, is that I browse deep web sites exposing scams and other dangers, teaching safer browsing methods, and they may have passed ads of the kind I mentioned, “the scam is out there, only those who want to fall for it will.”
It’s a strange and totally unusual cut-off on the platform, but I’ve said it before and I reiterate: don’t give power to big tech companies, in the end they do what they want and you can’t complain.
It’s not the first big company that, when confronted in some way, simply messed up and violated laws like LGPD (Brazilian General Data Protection Law), freedom of expression, CDC (Consumer Protection Code), and everything else.
The blog will continue to be more active than ever, and we’ll also continue on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook!
I’ll stop here, because since I lost a source of income, I need to work more. Bye!
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