Very Troubling YouTube Incident

[SneezyP]

Hey, I know I haven't been around in a while, but something very troubling just happened and I think the community needs to be aware of it.

I've been uploading sneezes and sneeze scenarios to YouTube for a couple of years now. I recently made friends with a fan of my recordings who was inspired to start her own channel.

She uploaded her first video, which was nothing but sneezes and a blank screen showing nothing. YouTube took down her video citing a violation of their community guidelines due to sexual content. She appealed, but her appeal was rejected.

If they're going to take down videos just because the content may sexually arouse some people, then I expect them to also take down videos involving people in swimsuits, etc..

She has another sneeze video up that apparently they haven't objected to yet... I don't know why or how that works, maybe somebody complained. But if that's the case, and we can be called out like this because of a single complaint, then for those of us who upload sneeze videos to YouTube,  none of our videos are safe!

Her YouTube alias is Badgirls Rule, and I'm sure you can understand that being smacked down like this when you're just starting out and getting excited about sharing stuff on YouTube is incredibly disheartening. But her situation isn't the point here. I don't know if we can do anything about this, maybe we can complain loudly and send messages somewhere... but we need to be aware of this and figure out what can be done. I've read through the community guidelines. They're a little vague, but I make a special effort to make sure that my scenarios contain no content that you wouldn't be able to see on daytime television, the private adult stuff being unlisted. If this is going to be a trend, though, then that may not be enough to keep my videos safe.

Looking for input. What do you guys think should or can be done about this?

Edited January 28, 2019 by SneezyP
punctuation

[SneezyP]

I've been starting to hear that others have been affected as well, at least one person has had their channel deleted.

How does YouTube decide when to go after people? Their guidelines aren't clear enough to give me solid rules as to what is and isn't acceptable, but I thought I was on firm enough ground... now I'm not so sure.

[facet]

.

Edited November 1, 2019 by facet
Removed by user.

[SneezyP]

 

Being a YouTuber, I did my homework on this before making my channel. They only said they didn't allow "Sexually Provocative" content, which was vague but I tried to stay within my bounds.

I thought I was on firm ground. After all, there are plenty of videos intended to be arousing that aren't sexually explicit. Belly dancing, make-out scenes, and people making all sorts of sexually suggestive videos without being explicit. If all they require for a video to be taken down is that it be "sexually provocative", that's an INCREDIBLY broad brush!

Edited January 28, 2019 by SneezyP

[SneezyP]

Well, I looked it up and apparently they do now include the words "fetish content" in areas of their policy as things they don't allow. That's a new addition...

I guess if they want to be dicks about it and make their guidelines more restrictive than they used to be, there's nothing we can do about it... but it really sucks!

Edited January 28, 2019 by SneezyP

[peach_princess]

Do you think I should create a clone channel then, and make all the videos there hidden from viewers? Just in case they take down my main channel. 

[SneezyP]

That's an idea. Also, perhaps upload videos to a Google Drive and just give the links to people who are interested...  I think those of us who share YouTube videos may need to think of alternate ways to get our content out just in case YouTube decides to purge us.

[SneezyP]

Wow, speak of the devil... one of my videos just got put behind an age restriction. I actually don't mind that... but how do they decide whether the video needs to be deleted or put behind age restriction? What's their criteria???

... and can we voluntarily put our videos behind age restrictions to head them off at the pass? I've never seen that option... does anybody know?

Edited January 28, 2019 by SneezyP

[sickprincess]

Their new crackdown is due to legislation that passed last year in the US called SESTA/FOSTA. It was presented as an anti-trafficking bill but was written poorly (probably intentionally) in order to target sex workers. All websites are now held responsible for "adult content" and can be sued or worse. It's why Instagram is deleting sex workers accounts, even those who don't post "sexual content", without warning. I would expect this on other sites as well, I know tumblr is cracking down recently. It's why back page and Craigslist personals were shut down. 

From my understanding, there's no specific criteria and they are opting to delete things more often than not. Not really much we can do about it at this point except email Senator Warren and tell her that SESTA/FOSTA was a huge fuckup? 

Be careful out there! 

[SneezyP]

An explanation! I guess this is the start of it then, we'll probably see a lot more of this happening very soon!

[SneezyP]

I'm downloading backups of all my favourite sneeze recordings. You guys should probably do the same. I'm using this site:

https://www.onlinevideoconverter.com/youtube-converter

If you're downloading a video that has actual video content, just make sure to set it to convert to something like flv instead of mp3

Also, you may want edit the files to have the YouTuber's username in them so you can keep track of which is from which

Edited January 28, 2019 by SneezyP

[SneezyP]

I've figured out how to manually set age restriction for my videos - on the web version of YouTube anyway, haven't figured it out on the app. It's in the "Advanced Settings" tab when you edit the video, right at the bottom there's a checkbox "Enable Age Restriction". Might be a good idea for YouTubers to do that to all their videos so that there's no complaint.

[Sneeze-aholic]

YT has removed two of mine, but I have no idea why they targeted those two rather than any of the others. 

The two they removed were average compared to others in terms of length,  number of views etc. 

 

[RB]

I suggest everyone use age restricted and see what happens. I suspect so long as the descriptions are not suggestive they won’t get robo-flagged and I think it’s higly unlikely someone would actively complain. 

[SneezyP]

Another idea: If any of you use tags to make your videos easily searchable, you might want to consider removing any tags from your videos that involve the word "fetish"

[peach_princess]

Do they take down videos within several days? So my question is, can I feel sage if it's been several weeks and nothing happened yet? 😅

[SneezyP]

I really don't know if you can feel safe or not. It's entirely possible that this was just a brief flurry of activity just to make it look like they're taking action to comply with the law and they won't go any further. On the other hand, there are a lot of fetish videos on YouTube, it may just be taking them a while to go through everything flagged by their system. 

It's only been a couple of days since I started getting word about this happening - did you have videos taken down weeks ago? If so, it's possible that those were because of complaints rather than this crackdown... but without knowing more it's hard to say.

Edited January 29, 2019 by SneezyP

[matilda3948]

Over the last couple of days my videos started to be flagged and removed. I was down to my "last strike" before they closed my account so I've taken down all my videos for now. I don't really have the time to look into alternative ways to share them but if someone figures out a better system, I have them saved. I understand why Youtube is doing it, even if it does seem a bit arbitrary. 

[Niceguy]

Sounds like Bondi should fire their old website back up. I mean... It was basically YouTube that made that site, and other ones like it, obsolete at the time. If YouTube now no longer wants to play ball...?

[ilikesneezes2000]

On 2/12/2019 at 9:52 PM, matilda3948 said:

Over the last couple of days my videos started to be flagged and removed. I was down to my "last strike" before they closed my account so I've taken down all my videos for now. I don't really have the time to look into alternative ways to share them but if someone figures out a better system, I have them saved. I understand why Youtube is doing it, even if it does seem a bit arbitrary. 

Truly a shame. Yours were definitely some of the best ever  

I wonder why they’re cracking down so much lately. None of mine have been touched ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

[Reader]

8 hours ago, Niceguy said:

Sounds like Bondi should fire their old website back up. I mean... It was basically YouTube that made that site, and other ones like it, obsolete at the time. If YouTube now no longer wants to play ball...?

The one on the forum that stopped working? Bondi’s Wav Page or something different? 

[cprlaw08]

On 2/14/2019 at 8:59 PM, Macunochi said:

@matilda3948 What do you think of the idea; vimeo with pasword and sharing in sneeze fetish forum the link and pasword??? Sorry for coment two times.

Be greatful for content provided by others but don't pressure people into providing answers or material for your own needs - that's not right! 

We are privileged to have had so much great material from Matilda but what she does with it and whether she uploads it is her choice no one else's- I feel like I shouldn't even have to be typing this ? 

[Niceguy]

9 hours ago, Reader said:

The one on the forum that stopped working? Bondi’s Wav Page or something different? 

Yeah, that's the one.  Of course, it doesn't have to be HIS page. Anyone could do one. But between the recent dustup on tumblr and now this nonsense with YouTube? Looks like we'll need to have our own, if we want to stay free from this sort of harassment.

[Heathcliff]

It's fucking hilarious that social media in general seems to have a problem shutting down fake news and extremist content- but can mobilise against sneeze fetishists like the SAS on crack.

P.S. If you'd like to hear my rant about why I don't like Mark Zuckerberg, PM me and it can be arranged.

[Bondi]

@NiceguyI can not get into the original Wav Page and haven't been able to for a while now. If I were to add anything, it'd be to the mirror site that I set up last year and hypothetically speaking, if it were to become as big as it was, say, twelve or thirteen years ago, then bandwidth would be a huge issue considering I'm on their free plan and I'd have to get my FTP out and figure out what the login info for that was again. I would maybe be willing to upload people's stuff again if they wanted me to, though it probably wouldn't be as prompt as it had been back in, say, 2002, so people might be impatient with that. If I were to upgrade my hosting package to a paid service that offers more bandwidth and other features, it might be possible to find a video-sharing script that I might be able to install in which users could upload their own videos on their own time with their own account, but that leads to a number of problems, such as, again, money, meaning taking on additional monthly expenses that I might not want or can't afford. And also moderating it in such a way that keeps it a safe and comfortable environment for content providers and everyone else.  So, yeah, lot of issues to consider not just for me, but for anyone else who wanted to take on such a task.

In the meantime, if YouTube does become completely unviable for uploading content, there's still Vocaroo, though stuff only stays there for a year, so not the best alternative. Are there other video sharing sites online that people can use as a better alternative to YouTube, since YouTube hasn't been as friendly to independent content creators in general over the last couple years?