Won't be available to anyone terminated for copyright stuff.
Woooow what a huge dick move.
That's the one massively imbalanced power dynamic that I hear people really fear losing their livelihood to for no good reason, and they're leaving it there to terrorize and ruin livelihoods for future generations.
I put up a video of a funeral service for my grandma and like 5 minutes later I was getting threatening legalese mail about my channel by cancelled forever because some record label has a recording of a thousand year old hymn and they don't give a shit about threatening people with no legal basis at all
Oh man I had a similar experience and realized how horrible it was. I put up a recording of me teaching my kids some Carnatic music. (The "twinkle twinkle little star" equivalent songs were like 800 years old). And I got takedowns almost immediately. Wtf. Luckily I was working at Goog at the time so I was able to actually find the "form" to explain how bs this was and was able to get those takedowns taken down! But then I tried to find an external way of doing it and it was easier to drive rusted nails through my eyeballs!
Unfortunately they have a virtual monopoly on ugc video streaming. Without competitive pressure highly centralized services become the playfield of government forces.
They didn't force anything, they gave them a choice, and Google consciously and actively chose to make this decision.
AP News chooses to still call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Mexico; a different choice from the outlets that no longer do. The New York Times, NBC News, the Hill and CNN chose to rather have their Pentagon access revoked; a different choice than the one made by New York Post, One America News Network, Breitbart News Network, HuffPost News and others.
It's important to keep repeating this. Companies, organizations and individuals all have choices. Not every one of them makes the same choice given the same situation - in fact, they make opposite choices.
Your second example of a choice is a consequence of a choice. Those companies chose not to comply with new reporting rules which resulted in having their Pentagon access revoked. This is an important distinction when given "choices" that aren't really choices but mandates.
As far as how this YouTube scenario is different, people can host their content elsewhere, but there's only one Pentagon in the US.
And I love how they're framing it as a "Second Chance". Like, you fucked up but we're going to be big and compassionate just this once.
The cynical me suspects that this instead is a more sweeping plan to cover for their coming re-listing of all the hate-filled, extremist channels that they had delisted in the past.
> The cynical me suspects that this instead is a more sweeping plan to cover for their coming re-listing of all the hate-filled, extremist channels that they had delisted in the past.
That's exactly what this is. And they're probably going to be pushed to delist LGBT content under some vague upcoming project 2025 indecency regulation by the FCC.
That's hilarious it's so strange to see copyright arguments in 2025 when every tech company that mingles in AI just doesn't give a fuck? Why should I care?
AI training is fair use. For pirating books, they probably calculate that the fine will be lower than their profits.
Assuming you're putting videos on YouTube, you should care because they have leverage over you and can ban you.
You seem to imply some kind of moral terms or reasons based on principles but that's not how corporations work. And either way they will get a pass because their stuff is extremely valuable for intelligence agencies and the military.
Trusting your livelihood to platforms like YouTube already puts you in an incredibly precarious position, even if you are playing by the rules. The Adocalypse comes to mind, as do random algorithm changes and flawed automation leading to videos getting demonetized. It's no wonder most of the creators I follow are hedging their bets on paid promotions and crowd funding platforms (which all have the same problems). I couldn't imagine the stress in relying on all that to pay off a mortgage.
We may have banned some nazis in the past, but now we're sorry, please come back. The political climate has changed and you are sorely needed. At least until the next election.
Speaking as a parent of young children, I don't see any point in going back to YouTube. It's been blocked in our household basically since our oldest was six, and I don't see any way they could ever lure us back into that ecosystem.
Save perhaps allowing access only to specific, curated (self-controlled) channels.
If anything, YT's announcement here suggests they're going to take an already terrible platform covered head to toe in schlock and say "y'know what, we can add on a few more buckets"
I'm curious, could you be more specific as to what exactly you mean by "schlock"? The ads? Product recommendations? Political content? Opinions?
For something that has a massive amount of videos added to it every minute, it's a surprisingly sanitised place.
They could introduce a kids friendly subdomain that would make it easier to filter at a proxy level. But then parents all over the world will be pulling their hair out about what is deemed to be kids friendly. The staunchly atheist might balk at content that is open towards Religion, the religious extremists will balk at content that is open to things like homosexuality, and the dietary extremists will complain about endorsements of the wrong choice of food. Humans like to make up lists of purity rules. But those lists rarely match.
I'm guessing they left right around the time of Elsagate. Youtube Kids (a separate "kid friendly" version of YouTube) was almost entirely bizarre permutations of software-assembled videos. I hear it still is, but most of my friends banned unsupervised youtube for their young kids around this time.
That is foolish. YouTube has some of the best educational content ever made. I suppose you could use yt-dlp to download all of 3Blue1Brown or other excellent educational channels.
This is the approach I've settled on. My kids get a very small amount of actual youtube time each week. If they find a new channel they really like, they pitch it to me. If I think it's good enough, I download the whole thing with yt-dlp for them. It works pretty well for us.
The majority of the "kids" content is just random slop with zero educational or even entertainment value. We noticed our three year olds were less prone to acting up when we took it away - now they'll typically watch Curious George and Paddington on Netflix or the various free to air kids shows on TV.
>If your YouTube channel is terminated, you are prohibited from using, possessing, or creating any other YouTube channels. You are also prohibited from letting others whose YouTube channels have been terminated use your YouTube channel to bypass their termination.
>This applies to all of your existing channels, any new channels you create or acquire, and any channels in which you are repeatedly or prominently featured.
I left because it’s infested with advertising that offensively begins playing loudly the millisecond a video page loads. The site feels janky and the algorithm games the consumers. YouTube still is in the business of feeding drivel to toddlers and shadowbanning normal user accounts from comments. Like Windows, YouTube lost my trust long ago and no amount of blog posting about how good they are will ever fix that. Odysee and Rumble are better experiences, unlike YouTube the sites let you play content in the background on mobile. Mainstream YouTube, an advertising delivery platform with concerns for the user and creator base being deep last.
You could just pay for premium. No ads, you can play content in the background on mobile and the creators get more money out of it. There is so much good stuff on YouTube in pretty much any niche you care to mention. Not to mention that YouTube's equivalent of Spotify is included in the price!
I pay for a lot of premium content but refuse to pay YouTube out of principle so I avoid consuming the content there, ultimately. Agree there’s a lot of great content, hopefully those creators keep expanding their distribution to reduce exclusivities.
They are still high on their power trip. They say creators will have an “opportunity” because creators “think YT might have made a mistake”. What a huge ass announcement
What about the thousands of channels that exist only to harass people? Not even public figures, but just ordinary people. YouTube is a huge part of that and they seem to not care at all about sorting it out. They are literally funding hate.
The creator economy needs to be regulated much better, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok are all too powerful and can take away your ability to speak online incredibly easily with almost no due process.
That's one perspective on it. The other perspective is that these online platforms are the only ones open for the public to be creators on, and some of them even pay creators.
Compare that to the gate-keepers that were before: Movie, TV and Music production companies, as well as book publishers. Those were severely limiting free speech according to their own policies, as well as mostly only accepting creators from wealthy and well connected families, or people who they could rip-off financially or sexually abuse. And this was when creativity was severely regulated.
So with all their flaws, YouTube and friends are still a million times better than the regulated creator economy of the past. Even though they've done absurd things like co-ordinated banning the president of the United States, and much more.
> Movie, TV and Music production companies, as well as book publishers… were severely limiting free speech according to their own policies
We’ve been casually throwing around the phrase “free speech” so much that it seems to have lost its meaning. Free speech was never about guaranteeing anyone and everyone a platform and an audience. At least within the context of US law, it’s about expressing ideas without government persecution, with some limits.
It’s an important distinction because now it seems some people are less concerned about the government protecting these rights and more about making sure they can still host videos on Youtube.
I understand but language is a moving and changing target, I think businesses like YouTube having as much power as they do is extremely problematic. Maybe I don't mean regulation, maybe some kind of citizens assembly that can make recommendations and enforce creators rights against the powerful... could maybe call it a Union of Creators or potentially something shorter?
Won't be available to anyone terminated for copyright stuff.
Woooow what a huge dick move.
That's the one massively imbalanced power dynamic that I hear people really fear losing their livelihood to for no good reason, and they're leaving it there to terrorize and ruin livelihoods for future generations.
I put up a video of a funeral service for my grandma and like 5 minutes later I was getting threatening legalese mail about my channel by cancelled forever because some record label has a recording of a thousand year old hymn and they don't give a shit about threatening people with no legal basis at all
Given how vague their "eligibility criteria" are and how they consider on- and off-platform behavior, I'm not sure that's such a great loss.
The whole thing reads like institutionalized selective enforcement.
Oh man I had a similar experience and realized how horrible it was. I put up a recording of me teaching my kids some Carnatic music. (The "twinkle twinkle little star" equivalent songs were like 800 years old). And I got takedowns almost immediately. Wtf. Luckily I was working at Goog at the time so I was able to actually find the "form" to explain how bs this was and was able to get those takedowns taken down! But then I tried to find an external way of doing it and it was easier to drive rusted nails through my eyeballs!
Unfortunately they have a virtual monopoly on ugc video streaming. Without competitive pressure highly centralized services become the playfield of government forces.
> The whole thing reads like institutionalized selective enforcement.
The State forced their hands here. Comply and let certain favored creators back, or else they might find themselves subject to political prosecution.
They didn't force anything, they gave them a choice, and Google consciously and actively chose to make this decision.
AP News chooses to still call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Mexico; a different choice from the outlets that no longer do. The New York Times, NBC News, the Hill and CNN chose to rather have their Pentagon access revoked; a different choice than the one made by New York Post, One America News Network, Breitbart News Network, HuffPost News and others.
It's important to keep repeating this. Companies, organizations and individuals all have choices. Not every one of them makes the same choice given the same situation - in fact, they make opposite choices.
Your second example of a choice is a consequence of a choice. Those companies chose not to comply with new reporting rules which resulted in having their Pentagon access revoked. This is an important distinction when given "choices" that aren't really choices but mandates.
As far as how this YouTube scenario is different, people can host their content elsewhere, but there's only one Pentagon in the US.
A monopolistic entity enforces opaque and arbitrary rules with little to no ability to appeal.
In less strange times this would merit the hammer coming down, but in 2025...
The whole thing is a weird mea culpa.
YouTube: We fucked up. A little.
And I love how they're framing it as a "Second Chance". Like, you fucked up but we're going to be big and compassionate just this once.
The cynical me suspects that this instead is a more sweeping plan to cover for their coming re-listing of all the hate-filled, extremist channels that they had delisted in the past.
> The cynical me suspects that this instead is a more sweeping plan to cover for their coming re-listing of all the hate-filled, extremist channels that they had delisted in the past.
That's exactly what this is. And they're probably going to be pushed to delist LGBT content under some vague upcoming project 2025 indecency regulation by the FCC.
That's hilarious it's so strange to see copyright arguments in 2025 when every tech company that mingles in AI just doesn't give a fuck? Why should I care?
> Why should I care?
AI training is fair use. For pirating books, they probably calculate that the fine will be lower than their profits.
Assuming you're putting videos on YouTube, you should care because they have leverage over you and can ban you.
You seem to imply some kind of moral terms or reasons based on principles but that's not how corporations work. And either way they will get a pass because their stuff is extremely valuable for intelligence agencies and the military.
There’s a word for that, hypocrisy.
Trusting your livelihood to platforms like YouTube already puts you in an incredibly precarious position, even if you are playing by the rules. The Adocalypse comes to mind, as do random algorithm changes and flawed automation leading to videos getting demonetized. It's no wonder most of the creators I follow are hedging their bets on paid promotions and crowd funding platforms (which all have the same problems). I couldn't imagine the stress in relying on all that to pay off a mortgage.
With other platforms (Twitter, Facebook) unsuspending accounts banned for hate speech and racism, I can't help but think this is a similar move.
We may have banned some nazis in the past, but now we're sorry, please come back. The political climate has changed and you are sorely needed. At least until the next election.
Speaking as a parent of young children, I don't see any point in going back to YouTube. It's been blocked in our household basically since our oldest was six, and I don't see any way they could ever lure us back into that ecosystem.
Save perhaps allowing access only to specific, curated (self-controlled) channels.
If anything, YT's announcement here suggests they're going to take an already terrible platform covered head to toe in schlock and say "y'know what, we can add on a few more buckets"
No it’s worse. The US government is making them reinstate people they don’t believe belong in the service at all.
I'm curious, could you be more specific as to what exactly you mean by "schlock"? The ads? Product recommendations? Political content? Opinions?
For something that has a massive amount of videos added to it every minute, it's a surprisingly sanitised place.
They could introduce a kids friendly subdomain that would make it easier to filter at a proxy level. But then parents all over the world will be pulling their hair out about what is deemed to be kids friendly. The staunchly atheist might balk at content that is open towards Religion, the religious extremists will balk at content that is open to things like homosexuality, and the dietary extremists will complain about endorsements of the wrong choice of food. Humans like to make up lists of purity rules. But those lists rarely match.
So I'm curious, what does your list look like?
I'm guessing they left right around the time of Elsagate. Youtube Kids (a separate "kid friendly" version of YouTube) was almost entirely bizarre permutations of software-assembled videos. I hear it still is, but most of my friends banned unsupervised youtube for their young kids around this time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate
kids friendly subdomain: https://www.youtubekids.com/
That is foolish. YouTube has some of the best educational content ever made. I suppose you could use yt-dlp to download all of 3Blue1Brown or other excellent educational channels.
This is the approach I've settled on. My kids get a very small amount of actual youtube time each week. If they find a new channel they really like, they pitch it to me. If I think it's good enough, I download the whole thing with yt-dlp for them. It works pretty well for us.
The majority of the "kids" content is just random slop with zero educational or even entertainment value. We noticed our three year olds were less prone to acting up when we took it away - now they'll typically watch Curious George and Paddington on Netflix or the various free to air kids shows on TV.
In other words, certain people banned for political reasons are now being unbanned for political reasons.
aka we realise there's only so many humans and we need some back to profit from them again
I am lost as to how all this works, so apologies for some dumb quesions:
1) If a person's channel is terminated, can they not already open another channel?
2) How is this different from a person either opening a new channel or getting a new Gmail and opening a new channel?
> Circumvention of channel termination
>If your YouTube channel is terminated, you are prohibited from using, possessing, or creating any other YouTube channels. You are also prohibited from letting others whose YouTube channels have been terminated use your YouTube channel to bypass their termination.
>This applies to all of your existing channels, any new channels you create or acquire, and any channels in which you are repeatedly or prominently featured.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802168
Wow Google really think they are the law
law? it's their platform.
and ban evasion is a persistent problem on any platform
I left because it’s infested with advertising that offensively begins playing loudly the millisecond a video page loads. The site feels janky and the algorithm games the consumers. YouTube still is in the business of feeding drivel to toddlers and shadowbanning normal user accounts from comments. Like Windows, YouTube lost my trust long ago and no amount of blog posting about how good they are will ever fix that. Odysee and Rumble are better experiences, unlike YouTube the sites let you play content in the background on mobile. Mainstream YouTube, an advertising delivery platform with concerns for the user and creator base being deep last.
I'm posting this here specifically for the audience: blocking ads is OK. Product managers offer no value add to development.
You could just pay for premium. No ads, you can play content in the background on mobile and the creators get more money out of it. There is so much good stuff on YouTube in pretty much any niche you care to mention. Not to mention that YouTube's equivalent of Spotify is included in the price!
I pay for a lot of premium content but refuse to pay YouTube out of principle so I avoid consuming the content there, ultimately. Agree there’s a lot of great content, hopefully those creators keep expanding their distribution to reduce exclusivities.
Why does reading this feels like a toxic relationship.
Right?? Omg, I felt the same way!
Yeah I was thinking "excuse me? no thanks, you can stick it"
They are still high on their power trip. They say creators will have an “opportunity” because creators “think YT might have made a mistake”. What a huge ass announcement
What about the thousands of channels that exist only to harass people? Not even public figures, but just ordinary people. YouTube is a huge part of that and they seem to not care at all about sorting it out. They are literally funding hate.
The creator economy needs to be regulated much better, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok are all too powerful and can take away your ability to speak online incredibly easily with almost no due process.
That's one perspective on it. The other perspective is that these online platforms are the only ones open for the public to be creators on, and some of them even pay creators.
Compare that to the gate-keepers that were before: Movie, TV and Music production companies, as well as book publishers. Those were severely limiting free speech according to their own policies, as well as mostly only accepting creators from wealthy and well connected families, or people who they could rip-off financially or sexually abuse. And this was when creativity was severely regulated.
So with all their flaws, YouTube and friends are still a million times better than the regulated creator economy of the past. Even though they've done absurd things like co-ordinated banning the president of the United States, and much more.
> Movie, TV and Music production companies, as well as book publishers… were severely limiting free speech according to their own policies
We’ve been casually throwing around the phrase “free speech” so much that it seems to have lost its meaning. Free speech was never about guaranteeing anyone and everyone a platform and an audience. At least within the context of US law, it’s about expressing ideas without government persecution, with some limits.
It’s an important distinction because now it seems some people are less concerned about the government protecting these rights and more about making sure they can still host videos on Youtube.
I understand but language is a moving and changing target, I think businesses like YouTube having as much power as they do is extremely problematic. Maybe I don't mean regulation, maybe some kind of citizens assembly that can make recommendations and enforce creators rights against the powerful... could maybe call it a Union of Creators or potentially something shorter?
https://archive.is/CCGNP
Yay, all the crazy lunatics will be back, more determined than ever to spew racial slurs and propagate disinformations. Exactly what YouTube needed.
I don't think it's a stretch to assume that demographic is also much more likely to click on scammy ads that confirm with their worldview.
Don't forget Frank Hassle and videos on the cancer curing properties of horse wormer.
Great, can't wait for chucke2009 narration of Mein Kampf /s
The end of woke and progresivism on YT? :)
Guess they’re running out of (fresh) content to feed to the ever increasing watchtime, and there is only so many video creators.
Basically running out of videos to serve their ads alongside to.