A YouTuber with 2.5 million views woke up to find his entire channel deleted and his desperate plea is going viral.
While some YouTubers need only work a couple of hours a day to earn thousands of dollars from AI-slop videos, others have built their channels from scratch after years of work. However, the rise of AI in YouTube's policy means some content creators' channels can be taken away in an instant.
YouTuber William Brown took to X to issue a plea to Team YouTube after he woke up to find his channel had been deleted.
"My name is William Brown and I woke up to my YouTube channel having been deleted this morning," the X user posted. I had 87,400 subscribers and 2.5M+ views.
Advert
"I built the channel over 2.5 years. I believe this removal was made in error. I have never had a channel strike or complaint, and my channel is purely educational, helping people start consulting businesses".
Explaining the nature of his content, Brown said: "Every video is grounded in my verified credentials as someone who successfully built and sold a business.
"None of my content contains harmful instructions, dangerous information or misinformation of any kind."
The Team YouTube responded to his post, confirming they were looking into the matter.
Unfortunately for Brown, he is far from alone. As AI tools have become part of YouTube's content moderation systems, a growing number of creators have found their channels terminated without warning.
YouTuber Shaz began compiling a public database of deactivated accounts after noticing the volume of similar cases cropping up online.
As shared by Metro, of the 260 accounts terminated since last January, 37 have been reinstated since then.
"It appears as though the AI is occasionally mistaking human content with qualities of automated spam," Shaz said (via Metro). "I personally believe this story will be seen as one of YouTube’s darkest moments in its history."
In a blog post last November, YouTube acknowledged the waves of concerns about termination and noted that nearly five million channels were removed between January and June last year, mostly for spam and scam-related activity.
Others fell under YouTube's circumvention policy, which prohibits creators from setting up new channels to get around an existing ban.
The Google-owned platform defended its approach in a statement to Metro: "We have used a combination of humans and AI to handle the scale and complexity of YouTube for many years.
"We investigated thoroughly and confirmed that our Community Guidelines enforcement systems are working normally."