🍂 Autumn 🍂

Brothers and friends, let us make this our motto: “Behind every channel, there is a human being.” To the @TeamYouTube and Executive Leadership, We eagerly await the day when you truly realize the amount of pain that some of the decisions made by your automated systems have caused — whether through channel removals, demonetization, or subjecting content to automated reviews that may fail to properly understand the context. How many people have gone to sleep crying after losing their channels, believing that what happened to them was unjust? How many creators have spent weeks or even months waiting for a response to their appeals? How many people have lost the source of income they depended on for years? And how many people are still holding on to hope that their channels will be restored, despite believing that they did not violate any policies? How many people have seen their relationships with their families and friends become strained because of the psychological pressure caused by waiting, simply hoping to receive a fair review? And in the end, their appeal may be rejected within seconds or minutes, or they may receive no response for many long months — without knowing when an answer will come, or whether their appeal has even reached a real human being who can listen to their case and understand its details. This is not simply about a channel being terminated or revenue being stopped. Behind every channel there is a human being, time, effort, dreams, and an entire livelihood. Many creators have found themselves trapped in a cycle of struggling with your automated support systems, automated responses, and appeals that do not always seem to reach your “experts” or internal review team — if such a team actually exists at all. This is how your automated system sometimes treats us: A cartoon image of a girl may appear in a video, and the context is misunderstood, leading to severe action against the channel — such as removing the channel entirely or completely disabling its monetization. A creator may joke with their audience, and their words may be taken out of context and interpreted as harassment or bullying. A creator may make videos about games and showcase their content, just as I do, only for their activity to be incorrectly classified as spam or deceptive content. A creator may talk about economics, and their activity may be misunderstood as deceptive commercial activity. A creator may include a link to their website, page, or contact method, and it may be interpreted as directing viewers to unwanted external websites. Do you realize the scale of the disaster that can occur when an automated system makes a life-changing decision, such as terminating an entire channel? Perhaps a creator violated a policy unintentionally. Does it really make sense for everything they have built — potentially all of their channels — to be removed, and for that person to be completely banned from YouTube forever? We are not asking for special treatment. We are not asking for the rules to be ignored. We are not asking YouTube to allow policy violations. We are asking for something much simpler: We are asking for a fair review. We are asking for a transparent review. We are asking for a genuine human review when the decision is life-changing. And we ask that creators not be left for weeks or months in a state of uncertainty, not knowing what happened or when they will receive an answer. We understand that automated systems can help you manage a platform of this enormous scale. But they should not have the final word when the decision concerns years of someone’s work, their source of income, or their future. Behind every channel, there is a human being. A human being who woke up early to create content. A human being who spent hours, days, and months building an audience. A human being who may have invested their savings, time, and dreams into their YouTube project. A human being with a family, responsibilities, and a life outside the screen. So when you take action against a channel, remember that you are not simply pressing a button inside a system. You may actually be pressing a button that changes someone’s entire life. We do not want a war with YouTube. We want to be part of this platform. We simply want to feel that there is a human being on the other side when something goes wrong. Behind every channel, there is a human being. And that human being deserves, at the very least, to be heard, to be understood, and to receive a fair review. @YouTube @YouTubeCreators @YouTubeIndia @YouTubeGaming @youtubemusic @nealmohan