YouTube deletes filmmaker account without explanation [UPDATE: it’s back!]

NewsIndustry

by Nino LeitnerJune 12^th, 2013

[See Update below – Nitsan got his account back! – click here to jump down]

Nitsan Simantov is a young filmmaker and avid video reviewer of filmmaking gear. You might have seen his work before as he posted over 200 video reviews on YouTube over the course of about 3 years, with a total of half a million views.

It has happened to others before, and this time it was Nitsan: YouTube has terminated his account without prior notice or proper explanation. If you head over to what used to be his YouTube channel, it says, “This account has been terminated due to repeated or severe violations of our Community Guidelines and/or claims of copyright infringement.”

According to Nitsan, he never knowingly broke the rules anywhere, and I believe him that thinking back to all of his videos I saw.

Let’s face it: the way YouTube and other big sites are curating and checking content is far from perfect and can be abused easily by “reporting” a site for no reason over and over again.

Also, if somebody manages to hack into an account, it’s almost impossible to get it back if they have bad intention: I have made the exact same experience with the Facebook page of a collaborative feature film that I managed – it had around 30,000 fans and was hacked. The hacker simply deleted all the other admins and “kidnapped” the page, asking for money (publicly on the wall!) to give us back control. It was utterly impossible to talk to anyone from Facebook despite many attempts, so we had to give it up entirely. No wonder – Facebook is a company with 3,000 employees and 750,000,000 users.

I suspect it’s not much different for the Google-owned YouTube.

Nevertheless, it’s not too much to ask for a proper explanation and a statement from them when they delete a relative popular YouTube channel. The ads on the channel were on of Nitsan’s main sources of income, so it hurts him badly.

Ironically, he was even featured on the YouTube Creator Blog a while ago:

Nitsan is desperate to talk to anyone at Google or YouTube and therefore he wrote an open letter:

Dear Youtube staff,
I am a hard working, helpful and honest person. My Youtube channel is what gets me enough work to pay my rent, which is not easy, my family is all living abroad and my mother has recently passed away. Please allow me the opportunity to fix any mistake I have done. Let me know what the issue is and I will be sure to fix it. Here are links showing the big support I am getting. Please find it in your heart to help me. – Thank you, Nitsan Simantov.”

To find out how you can help Nitsan to get his channel back, head over to his blog by clicking here and scroll down to “How You Can Help”. Let’s help a fellow video blogger getting his videos back – believe me, not having his reviews online anymore is a true loss!

UPDATE (June 19):

Nitsan informed us that his account is back. So I guess our combined efforts worked!

@NinoLeitner @c5dnews Thanks man. And another huge thanks for posting my story! All I know is that it was a video, but i dont know a reason

— Nitsan Simantov (@Nitsan_s) June 17, 2013

@NinoLeitner Yeah, got an email that said it was reviewed and i'm not in violation. No details.

— Nitsan Simantov (@Nitsan_s) June 17, 2013