Strike you’re out! Or maybe not?
Imagine you’ve spent hours editing and shooting your latest YouTube video, when only a few days after its debut on the site, the video comes down and you’ve received -- what? -- a strike for a violation of our Community Guidelines? Is this baseball?!
With over 24 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute, it’s impossible for us to pre-screen content. That’s why we count on our community members to know the Community Guidelines and flag content that violates the rules. We review all flagged content and if we find a video does violate the guidelines, the video comes down and in most instances, the uploader receives a strike in their account.
As you can imagine, with the massive volume of videos on our site, sometimes we make the wrong call. Last week we launched a more accessible appeals process, designed to make it easier for you to contest a takedown and a strike against your account for a Community Guidelines violation. So, if you think your video was removed mistakenly, you can appeal the strike within your own account. Here’s how:
When you sign into your account, you’ll need to acknowledge your Community Guidelines strike. After that, you can sign into My Account Settings and appeal your video strike directly from the "Manage Account" section under "Account Status". After we review your appeal, if we find that your video did not violate our Community Guidelines after all, we will reinstate it and remove the strike from your account. We’ll also send you an email letting you know the result of your appeal request.
Ultimately, YouTube is a platform for free expression, so we want to ensure that as much content is allowed to remain on the site as possible. Just like in baseball, we need a few rules to keep the game moving along, although now with YouTube, you have the option to talk to the umpire.
To learn more about the strike appeals process, check out this page in our Help Center. Note that this new process only applies to strikes for violations of our Community Guidelines. More information about copyright strikes may be found here.