When Your YouTube Channel Is Blocked

About This Document

The case studies section of the IT resources are normally used to highlight the background for a sides development work in using digital services. Sides are often willing to share their experiences across the morris community. But sometimes problems can occur and there may be a reluctance to make others aware of this – even though, ironically, there is often more to learn from hearing about mistakes and problems rather than simple success stories.

So we have decided to encourage sharing of stories of when things have gone wrong – and we will note publish details of the side concerned unless permission is granted,

When A YouTube Channel is Blocked

One side recently discovered that the side’s YouTube channel no longer displayed the side’s videos – instead a rather alarming message was displayed stated that the channel was guilty of “severe or repeated violations of our spam, deceptive practices and scams policy“

A subsequent email message repeated the message and stated that

We know this is probably very upsetting news, but it’s our job to make sure that YouTube is a safe place for all. If we think a channel severely violates our policies, we take it down to protect other users on the platform – but if you believe we’ve made the wrong call, you can appeal this decision. You’ll find more information about the policy in question and how to submit an appeal below.

What our policy says

Spam, scams or commercially deceptive content are not allowed on YouTube. 

The email contained details of an appeals process and the process was followed – and nothing happened 🙁

However several weeks later the appeals process was repeated. It was noticed that process included two fields to give email addresses – one for the address used linked to the YouTube channel, and a second for ‘communications’.  The side had two email addresses  which are used on online services, and in the second appeal the email address linked to the YouTube account was used for both – and this time the appeal was successful and the YouTube channel was restored a few hours later with this time the email response saying:

After taking another look, we can confirm that your channel does not violate our Community Guidelines.

Lessons Learnt

We now know that YouTube channels can be taken down for no valid reason; an appeals process is available but it may not work first time!

Perhaps the two main lessons to learn are (1) the importance of knowing the email address used when setting up your YouTube account and (2) checking your side’s email accounts regularly (this particular problem was known about shortly after the channel had been suspended as the email account is checked on a regular basis).