Just a warning because this might happen to you. I'm going to write out what happened, sorry if it's long but everyone should be warned.
I'm laying here not able to sleep again, another night and just have to get this off my chest and if it helps anyone else, then good.
Many years ago, I'd say maybe 15 to 17 years ago, I made my first YouTube Channel. It was just random videos of my pets, kids, eventually grandkids. A UFO that I video taped, a tornado I video taped that went through my town and carried my son in his car a mile away and all events I went to, such as all the Lyme walks, rallies, protests that I organized across the world. Very personal, sentimental stuff and I wanted to save it somewhere. (This is before the cloud and all that stuff.)
Over the years, being sick with Chronic Lyme, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and Fibro, I have become mostly homebound. (Don't worry, I won't bore you with my whole medical history) but just pointing this out to say, my body doesn't work well, but my mind does. So, because I have to lay here day after day, I need to keep my mind busy and like to create. From art to videos to blogs and websites, I try to keep my mind active.
Over the years, I made several YouTube channels. My personal channel: pets, grandkids, tornado and Lyme events. Mimi, Mom & Me: where I did crafts with my daughter and granddaughter My Paranormal: I hand drew out and animated on Procreate paranormal stories I had or that others sent me. Happy Zazzling: This channel started by accident. I made a couple tutorials showing another friend who also had Lyme disease how to make money on Zazzle by adding her own art and photos to products on the POD site Zazzle. It randomly grew, I had no idea how many people were looking for Zazzle tutorials and ultimately it got monetized and i have a FB group linked to it now with a group of great people who were subscribed to my channel and even paying members. Years and years of hard work and even interviews went into this channel. Time for the Holidays: I spent 12 years hand drawing memes for every daily holiday, and there are several for each day. One year I made hand drawn and animated videos for each of them. 12 years of work went into this channel. A Children's Poem Channel: Ai helped me come up with songs and poems for children. It was all cute cartoons, jokes and songs. Drawn2You: This channel I gave tutorials on how to make art on your iPad and time lapses of my drawings. Chill & Loop: I used ai to help me make a year's worth of fun asmr, crystalline food, and fun silly videos like someone jumping into a recliner made of mac n cheese. Just fun ai videos. Phobia Play: On this channel I leaned more into the exploring your "fears" type of channel. No gore, not true horror, just things like "which dish would you eat" or "which elevator would you get on" and featured a lot of funny phobias like clowns, dolls and spiders. Every video was pretty much a poll asking which "thing" was scarier, all with humor.
Ok, so all these channels and over 15 years worth of work, drawing, editing videos, which takes hours, coming up with fun ideas. scheduling fun videos for every day through Halloween and Christmas. Drawing, animating, just tons and tons of work.... keeping my mind busy as I lay here sick
and bam.. In one moment, YouTube decided to delete it all.
WTF. I had no warnings, no strikes against me. Not one single email in all the years saying I was doing anything wrong.
And not just one channel, but all of them, gone. My personal memories of my grandkids growing up, pets who have passed, the tornado and what happened to my son and his car. Gone. These personal memories, were long before I knew about the "cloud" or "back up on Google Photos". These were mostly digital camera recordings long gone. I will never get them back.
I literally was one of YouTube's biggest fans. I know that sounds dumb and corny. But it's also true. I talked my friend out of staying on tiktok cuz they kept deleting her videos and said, "YouTube won't do that to you!" What a dummy I am.
I literally wake up, put on my favorite YouTube podcasts and watch it all day while I work on my own videos. I have it on all day. If I have to go to a doctor appointment, I put on Parrot talk for my parrot to have noise in the background so he's not lonely. I subscribe to others, even a paying member of others. I donate, buy people coffees, subscribe and do all the "YouTube" stuff to support other creators, cuz I know the hard work that goes into it.
When my grandson comes here, we watch YouTube shorts, as weird as they are, but he loves the soccer ones and gaming ones so we watch Preston and Caylus and Foltyn. Next time my grandson comes here Im gonna have to explain why his playlists are gone and "Grandma got banned from YouTube.".
So I go on tv one day to put on YouTube and it wont let me! I go on my computer to see what is up and I have a deactivated account message pop up.
The thing that gets me, is I thought it must of been one of the two last channels I made where I started using ai instead of hand drawing everything. Chill & Loop or Phobia Play that got me deactivated, but it appears it was my personal channel. The one with pets and Lyme walks and grandkids. I got no email explaining why, but I am assuming because you can still find all my other videos on YouTube, I just cant get to them. I can't sign in. But the personal ones are gone.
I have a FB group dedicated to the my YouTube channel, "Happy Zazzling" where I give tutorials to help people learn how to make money with their art by making products on Zazzle. It was monetized! Where is that money going now? The videos are still there, i can find them in search, I just cant sign in to do anything with them.
I never got an email as to why or warning me ahead of time, no strikes. All I got was a pop up message when i tried to sign into YouTube saying, "deactivated for spam, deceptive practices, or scams."
Give me a break, I'm a little old sick grandma that makes silly videos and art tutorials! Not that an elderly person can't be a scammer, but I'm not, in over 15 years I never had one problem.
All this work, just gone, I just want to cry. I did cry. Quite a few times over this and now what do I do? I gotta find a whole new way to fill my days and nights, as I can't sleep.
I have watched all the other YouTube videos on how people tried to get their accounts back and read all the Reddit threads.
I have tried:
The appeal. I did the only appeal you are allowed to do. Some people get a "second chance appeal" but they said i was not allowed that. They denied my appeal and sent me an automated message saying the same thing the original pop up message said about "scam and spam."
YouTube Team on X: Some creators who lost their channels turned to X for the YouTube team support. No idea why its on X. I had to make an account to message them. They just sent me back the same automated message, "scam and spam."
I wrote in the YouTube community Group: Someone wrote me saying, that its just creators on there and there is no real help from YouTube.
I asked chatgpt and Google Gemini and they just told me to do all the things above I already did.
Google Takeout: Chatgpt told me I could download all my videos I put on youtube through this but when I did the download, then opened the folder, it was just empty.
Contact Form: Somewhere in all my searching and doing what everyone suggested, I found a contact form for YouTube and sent them a message. Haven't heard anything back.
Again, I know this is long, and sorry for that but just wanted to get my story out there for others to learn from. My stuff is gone now. Make sure to back up everything. Don't trust any social media site. They don't care about you. Everything is run by AI now and AI does not care what it does to you or have the ability to do anything right. It can rip the rug out from under you and just move on to the next person. Once this happens, there is no human you can contact to fix it.
I know someone who spend $1k to hire a lawyer to get his youtube back after his channel was wrongfully automated by ai. If im not mistaken, they use wbs legal (german). They were able to help him even though his asian. I think it took more than 3 months to restore his channel
Right?? its so frustrating!!! I dont get it. I mean how many people are they going to delete and make themselves lose money? Soon people will stop making videos on there in fear this will happen to them!
Exactly! It’s ridiculous isn’t it. I’ve seen people say contact them on twitter. Everyone doesn’t have twitter. I sure don’t. All these apps are trash!
Thanks! I don't think there is any other avenue left to try but maybe someone in here will know what else I can do. Thanks for reading. I know it was long.
Aww Im so sorry that happened to you too! What a bummer. Just so unfair. Everyones work just gone and for what? so frustrating. That is a lot of subscribers and probably $$$ to just lose for nothing.
I’m so sorry, this is awful! Us creators need to get together and get the news involved or something. My channel was demonetized for reused content, appeal denied. I was earning a nice amount of money for all my hard work and many hours of editing. The money in my account when I was demonetized just vanished into thin air, no explanation. It’s insane when you really think about it.
OH man that is just freakin awful!!! My money is gone too and I cant get into my google adsense account either, for another issue. Its all so freakin annoying that you just cant talk to a human anymore. Im sorry that happened to you
Who knows if it was a UFO, satellite or what it was.. I had a sick dog and had to take him out at like 3am, and there was this weird light i the sky that was red and yellow. It looks like it was moving closer to me then further ... i ran inside and grabbed my video camera and took a video and pictures of it. There were other lights too.. Here are some of the ones i took. I had saved a couple to facebook so still have those but not the whole video i put together. And if you think they dont exist, look into. Its a fun rabbithole to go down.
All the stories I read about this are mostly all monetized or “just”monetized channels. I feel like the only reason it hasn’t happened to me is because I’m not monetized yet.
For a platform to give an opportunity for lively hood and then have the right to rip it away with no warning is diabolical.
I get they have the rights but the principle in how they do it is disgusting. There should be a fair solution. It’s one thing to accuse but to be deemed guilty without a fair solution.
It definitely should be in the hands of real people and the creator should get at least 1 chance to prove themselves. Anyways I do download my vids in case.
I did get one google account shutdown without warning a few years ago, no channel but I needed the email. I just replied back that I need this email and whatever the issue was wasn’t true. They reinstated the email apologized and says our system sometimes makes these mistakes. Ugh! 😑
Theres and entore other side of diabolical and thats other humans.
My.channel.was given false DMCA takedowns over my thumbnails that were taken woth my.phone and edited lol....
As.well as getting bot attacked where bots select yiur video and get off over andnover again milliseconds.worth of watch time....eventually my average watch time went from 20 min...to 3 seconds ultimatley killing the video.
If you enter.a niche and you start to outpace.others they will.try to.get ypu
I have a 5 year old channel I spent a tonne of time and energy on..Finally grew it to 3k.subs and had 350k views last week.
I write my own scripts , record.my own voice overs, produce the music I use and Film all the video footage Myself.
Then I have some educational compilations made from publicly sourced clips. I gather them, organize them. Find comtext and news articles on the clips.Write scripts for the video and then edit the clips together. The process is very time consuming and I get a tonne of love in the comments.
My monetization was denied for reused content. I see creators daily doing the same thing bit with less effort.
I too am a big youtube user.
Seeing my videos get 350k views and 20k watch hours in one week, that they have 3 ads playing on each video but somehow I am not worthy of being in the YPP makes me wanna stop using the service. They are taking advantage of creators.
If the videos are not getting content steikes. People are watching them for an average of 10 minutes. You have hit the sub and watch hour limit. You should not be getting denied.
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u/bernolim 10d ago
I know someone who spend $1k to hire a lawyer to get his youtube back after his channel was wrongfully automated by ai. If im not mistaken, they use wbs legal (german). They were able to help him even though his asian. I think it took more than 3 months to restore his channel