How New Web Privacy Policies Are Killing Content Creators

Last Updated on May 3, 2018 by Catherine Tobsing

My YouTube channel has been abducted – please help me find it

After beginning an upload for a 17 minute video capturing the inner workings of Animal House of Chicago, a fine veterinary hospital we spent quality time at yesterday, I moved into the kitchen for breakfast.

Experimenting with our new keto diet I had a lox (smoked salmon) and onion omelet, with an avocado on the side to make up for the zero tolerance bread thing.

Returning to my 40 inch monitor having mentally mapped out a day of building blog posts with video galleries, I noticed an error on YouTube indicating the Animal House the video cannot be finished uploading “there’s a problem with your YouTube account”

It was suspended.

I saw an email

We’d like to inform you that due to repeated or severe violations of our Community Guidelines (https://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines) your YouTube account WindyCityParrot.com has been suspended.

After review we determined that activity in your account violated our Community Guidelines, which prohibit spam, scams or commercially deceptive content (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2801973?hl=en).

Please be aware that you are prohibited from accessing, possessing or creating any other YouTube accounts. For more information about account terminations and how our Community Guidelines are enforced, please visit our Helper Center

If you would like to appeal the suspension, please submit this form.

For those of you who don’t know me/us, we are

Windy City Parrot

We sell supplies for pet birds.

Our YouTube channel is 12 years old – yep established 2006

It has 755,000 views

We’ve earned 50,000 and 100,000 views on some solo videos

Somehow, my method of feeding 5 FIDS on Fridays or mentioning that Ralph, a chinchilla boarded at Animal House would bite your finger off if presented with the opportunity – triggered the wrath of Susan Wojcicki, YouTube’s current CEO.

I don’t know what that falls under?

“Harmful or dangerous content”?

It was just a verbal warning.

“Could Nudity or sexual content” refer to our talks about bird sexing, which is related to determining if a bird is a boy or girl because 80% of parrots are monomorphic thus you can’t tell the sex by the color?

I’m not sure about “Hateful content”.

Here’s two statements that can be construed as “Hateful content’:

My bird “hates” fresh vegetables.

My parrot “hates” going to the veterinarian.

Would those “hateful” statements get us banned?

“Hey YouTube was this the doing of bots or humans”, it’s so hard to tell these days with you guys who have all the money and hold all the (video) cards.

Is this “Violent or graphic content”?

I recently posted a video on my Facebook timeline with an opportunistic eagle grabbing food out of a small fox’s jaws.

It was pretty graphic but was “it crossing the line”?

File under what on God’s green earth does “Harassment and cyberbullying, Threats, Spam, misleading metadata, and scams, Copyright, Privacy, Impersonation, Child endangerment, have to do with the care and feeding of pet birds?

Hello,

Thank you for your account suspension appeal. We have decided to keep your account suspended based on our Community Guidelines and Terms of Service.

Please visit http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines for more information.

Please do not respond to this email. Replies to this email will not be processed. Please refer to our Help Center for more information.

Sincerely,

The YouTube Team

What’s a “YouTube channel recovery strategy”?

So far it’s

Reaching out to a couple of contacts from Google that I’ve networked with in the past.
Going to IRCE on Wed 6/6/18 – Will show a milk carton flyer sheet asking “Have you seen this YouTube channel that was recently abducted”? See if I can get some press
Called G suite support which does not provide any information about YouTube
Post this content to many social media platforms.
Reach out to AdWords asking why they allowed their cousin YouTube to delete the library of video ad content I’ve been creating all winter.
Recover what videos I can from Drive and Facebook then upload to Jetpack for hosting.
Reach out to all WordPress YouTube plugin developers.

Here’s a sample of our latest heinous video (now hosted on Jetpack)

It’s like when Facebook banned the New Zealand Office of Tourism for their their theme “Come see our boobies” referring of course to the native blue footed boobie bird.